Signs it is time to revisit XML sitemaps

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A few signals that XML sitemaps is due some attention.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well
• Only list pages you actually want indexed

The practical version

Keep it current or it works against you. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

In practice

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about XML sitemaps before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Only list pages you actually want indexed — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.