SEOmoz.org’s Rand Fishkin recently blogged about sitemaps. Sitemaps sit on your server and assist search engine spiders to crawl and index your site. Fishkin believes sitemaps may hurt your SEO efforts. SEO personalities RustyBrick and David Naylor support Fishkin on this concern. Google’s Central Product Manager Vanessa Fox does not consider sitemaps to be a hinderance.

“There’s no difference in indexing based on how we found a page.”

Fox advises going along with the rules, such as making sure webmasters have a crawlable site, that’s well linked, and has excellent exclusive subject matter.

“You know, links to your site, internal links, make sure we can access and crawl the pages, make sure the content is unique and valuable, and know there’s a lot of things that go into it. We’re not just going to take the sitemap and index all these pages, no matter what they are, just because you submitted a sitemap. I mean, clearly. But, why not do both things, because a sitemap will add to, there’s a couple of times when a sitemap is particularly valuable.”

Fox feels a sitemap doesn’t take the place of those features, but works as an extra tool for webmasters.
Fox included that a sitemap may make it easier for webmasters to find problems in their sites.

“If the site has pages with errors that prevent us from crawling, the pages won’t appear in the index and those pages will be listed in the Crawl Errors section of Webmaster tools. We may not have attempted to crawl some of these pages if they weren’t in the Sitemap, so in this case, a Webmaster might be alerted to problems not otherwise known.”

Fox looks forward to future advancements to allow webmasters know about more problems. Fox thinks Sitemaps enable webmasters to get a complete look at their site.

“A sitemap is a way for you to say here is every single page on my site, here’s a comprehensive view. And, that helps us out, and it helps the site out.”

Fishkin doesn’t believe that sitemaps help.

“The data you get from the natural crawl IS valuable, and submitting an XML feed (or any other format) can cause that natural process of inclusion to be lost. If a page isn’t accessible, doesn’t carry enough link juice, or lacks unique, valuable content, I want to know about it, and the Sitemaps process can be a hindrance.”

Fishkin still believes sitemaps cause obstacles that stand in the SEO’s way.

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