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What is the Impact of XML sitemaps
this is an issue happened with me when i have added new xml site map to my site and submit it to Google. all the old pages that been indexed over the past 3 years were removed. and my listings on SEPRs dropped and removed.... i want to discuss this issue with SEO experts. as i'll be adding xml sitemaps to my clients. does that affect their ranking? or what happened with me was just a special case? it's really an important issue so any one has a point to add would be appreciated.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jmoe
this is an issue happened with me when i have added new xml site map to my site and submit it to Google. all the old pages that been indexed over the past 3 years were removed. and my listings on SEPRs dropped and removed.... i want to discuss this issue with SEO experts. as i'll be adding xml sitemaps to my clients. does that affect their ranking? or what happened with me was just a special case? it's really an important issue so any one has a point to add would be appreciated.
An XML sitemap can't do damages on such a big scale. You must have some other issues. I don't use XML sitemaps and don't recommend them. They are good for nothing. If you have some crawling/indexing problem then fix them. You can't force search engines through sitemaps to crawl and index all of your pages.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by seo-gurgaon
I don't use XML sitemaps and don't recommend them. They are good for nothing. If you have some crawling/indexing problem then fix them. You can't force search engines through sitemaps to crawl and index all of your pages.
To dismiss the value of XML sitemaps as being worthless seems perhaps a little extreme.
For a small site, their value is questionable, but for medium to large sites the ability to notify search engines about new or updated pages in deeper parts of the site is very useful. It could take days (or even weeks) for the search engines to locate these additions/alterations from a standard webcrawl, whereas an XML sitemap can alert them to it within 24 hours.
Sure, there are other ways of doing so -- social bookmarking the pages, linking to them from the homepage, etc -- but this is not always possible, nor appropriate.
Any decent CMS should automatically create XML sitemaps for you, so they require no time or effort on your part to implement.
Back to the OP's question:
As has already been mentioned, ordinarily there's no way submitting a sitemap can harm your rankings. The only time I've seen XML sitemaps cause issues is when they contain URLs that are different to those used on the site, yet still function, thus creating duplicate content problems.
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Notice you don't see any http://www.myspace.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.facebook.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.twitter.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.boston.com/sitemap.xml etc...
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JagNet
For a small site, their value is questionable, but for medium to large sites the ability to notify search engines about new or updated pages in deeper parts of the site is very useful.
As mentioned above you don't see any http://www.myspace.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.facebook.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.twitter.com/sitemap.xml, http://www.boston.com/sitemap.xml etc...
MySpace alone has several million web pages.
Not even yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com/sitemap.xml
Which is the most popular website in the world
And if you think that these sites are not bothered whether or not the web pages get indexed cos of there huge market share and visibility, then what about ebay and amazon. Where are the XML sitemaps on these two most popular e-commerce website.
And where is the XML sitemap on the seochat.com?
Google recommends XML sitemaps. But I have always faced some sort of problem when i used XML sitemaps. And not using it won't cause any harm to rankings. So i just don't use it.
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A couple of points...
1) XML Sitemaps are nice to have in place, just for the peace of mind. They might not be worth great effort, but if they can be easily done, why not!
2) XML Sitemaps do NOT have to be located at /sitemap.xml - so just because you can't see them for various public sites by typing that in does not mean that those sites don't have XML sitemaps.
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What is the Impact of XML sitemaps
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