Sitemaps Are an Essential Part of Your Website
You want to do everything you can to help your website rank higher in user searches. A site map can help you do that. Learn the benefits of sitemaps and how you can use them to improve your SEO performance.
What Is a Site Map?
With a great sitemap, you can flag your key pages so that Google is more likely to pick them up in searches. Information in the site map includes the original publish date, how often you make content changes and available languages.
URLs listed in the sitemap feed Google the information it needs to display pertinent pages in search results. Most sitemaps are created in HTML or XML. Google uses XML, while HTML sitemaps can help visitors navigate around your website.
Benefits of Using a Sitemap
An XML sitemap allows you to pass information that may improve your ranking, as follows:
- By listing all the URLs on your site, you can highlight pages that Google wouldn't otherwise know about.
- You can assign priority to certain pages. Using the right tags, you can influence how search engines order your pages while crawling the web.
- Two tags, lastmod and changefreq, tell Google when you last made changes to the site and how often you change each page.
Since Google doesn't like duplication, this record can help you out if someone tries to steal your content.
Content Duplication and Sitemaps
Sometimes, websites syndicate their content to other sites. Other times, someone will lift your content and display it on their own site without permission.
Google doesn't differentiate between these two situations when evaluating content duplication. Having duplicate content hurts your search ranking. However, Google only penalizes websites that have copied content, not the original poster.
Information passed in an XML sitemap helps Google determine the original owner of the content. If that's you, your page could appear in search rankings while the copied content is ignored.
How to Handle Sitemaps for Very Large Sites
XML files can technically be up to 50MB in size. However, there are two additional considerations when formulating your sitemap strategy. 1) Each file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs. 2) Google has a limit of 10MB. So, it makes sense to limit your sitemap to 50,000 URLs or less and a total size of 10MB.
Fortunately, you can parse your sitemap into smaller files, connecting them via an index file. This is perfectly acceptable to search engines, which know how to crawl through sitemap index files.
Sitemaps for Image and Video Files
You can also create sitemaps for images and video files. These differ from XML files and aren't as common. If you want to highlight video and images on your website, these customized sitemaps can allow you to pass more information to Google, such as captions, descriptions and other metadata.
Sitemaps provide insight that makes it easier to test the user experience, improve ranking in search engines, and scale your website for growth. Whether you aim to maximize SEO, ensure that your site is well-planned or make it easy for developers to navigate your pages, sitemaps are an invaluable resource.
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