SEO: Are XML Sitemaps Actually Important Or Are They The Most Overrated SEO Tactic Ever?

Here lately there seems to be some debate on whether or not XML sitemaps are beneficial to achieving those top rankings on you want on the various search engines, namely Google. Recently, various SEO experts have written some posts on whether or not they think it’s beneficial to use. Here are some of those posts that are worth the read. If you know of any others please let us know and we’ll include them.

Barry Schwartz: “I have always been a believer that well on-page optimized sites do not require or even benefit much from Google Sitemaps. But at the same time, I also do believe that giving Google extra clues about your site does help. It is something you need to think about.”

Matt McGee: “Whenever I take part in a Site Review session at some conference, one of my fellow panelists will inevitably tell a webmaster something like, “You don’t have an XML sitemap. Create one and submit it to the search engines as soon as you can.” I’ve yet to have the opportunity to play devil’s advocate on that during a session, but I’m going to do it here on SBS.”

Ann Smarty: “I for one have never had any bad experience with sitemaps (though I keep reading about it now and then and agree there is probably no smoke without the fire). On the other hand, I haven’t seen any major effect either. Still I don’t think Google is so evil that it offers a tool and than turns it for bad (call me naive).”

As for our opinion, I don’t think it’s crucial to your SEO efforts, but I also don’t think it will hurt you in any way. A site map will not fix crawling issues; but will it help robots crawl a website faster? At Regency Interactive, we create XML sitemaps for all of the websites that we work on (minus any that can’t upload one) and as for the amount of traffic you gain/lose that’s something we leave our clients in charge of so we don’t have any numbers to report on the loss or gain of traffic from Google.

I’m in agreement with Barry and everyone else in that you should try it out on your own for a few months and see what it can do for you. Also, why not even go so far as to post your results as well or even comment on our post and let us know how it worked for you.

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