Perform a Google search for “XML Sitemaps” and the first result is a fantastic looking XML Sitemap generator! These Automated Sitemap Creators are, by design, worthless. More harm, than good can come out of using these generators for your site.
Why? First lets take a macro look at XML Sitemaps:
Search Engines agreed on a standard format for these sitemaps when they realized that, with many sites containing well beyond a million pages, the growing web was going to take a lot longer to crawl and index. They proposed Sitemaps to allow for the following benefits:
- More comprehensive indexing of large sites
- Ability to understand whether a page has been updated without having to load the whole page
- Ability to quickly understand how often a page is updated
- Knowledge of the preferred URL to serve when choosing between two different duplicate pages
SEO Experts will see that I left “ability to understand importance of a page” off of the list. Sitemaps protocol does include a tag that theoretically allows its creator to specify the “priority” of the page (from 0-1), but I have never seen an occaision where this arbitrary number took precedence over the search engine’s sophisticated ranking algorithm.
Now lets take a macro look at Sitemap Generators:
XML Sitemap generators are simple web crawlers that all follow a basic process:
- User points crawler at their homepage URL, http://www.example.com for example
- Crawler loads homepage HTML, looks for all links to other internal pages.
- Crawler loads HTML from links it found, looks for more internal links.
- Repeat…
The crawler ends up spitting out a nicely formatted XML sitemap that includes all the links it found in its 2 minute crawl of your site.
Now you see why Sitemap Generators are worthless: By design, they cannot provide any value that Search Engine’s sophisticated crawlers don’t provide already.
Who do you trust to do a smarter crawl of your site: Joe’s Ad-Supported XML Sitemap Generator, or the GoogleBot, featuring more than 10 years of relentless improvement and evolution?
So what is a webmaster to do? Here’s a nice Flowchart that will help you decide:
XML Sitemaps decision map
Note that there is NO path that ends in using an Online XML Sitemap Generator.
