: Is sitemap really important? Is the sitemap really important? I ask this because I couldn't see the sitemaps of big websites such as Twitter, Facebook and others... The sitemap should be at

@Lengel546

With sitemaps you can increase page indexation on Google:
you can register your sitemaps on www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ in the tab exploration / sitemaps of each site.

By the way this site has other fonctionnalities which can help on Google referencing.

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@Dunderdale272

What is an XML Sitemap and why is having one important for SEO? Good question! Think of your website as a house and each page of your site as a room. You can think of an XML Sitemap like a blueprint for your house and each web page were a room, your XML Sitemap would be a blueprint—making it easy for Google, the proverbial home inspector of the web—to quickly and easily find all the rooms within your house. XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site’s pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not just websites.

There is no downside of having an XML Sitemap and having one can improve your SEO, so we highly recommend them.

XML Sitemaps are especially important if:

You have pages on your site created dynamically (e.g. some e-commerce sites)
Your site is not well-structured or well-linked (internal links)
Your site has few external links or is new (a newly developed site just set “live”)


My site is large and/or has lots of archived content that may not be well-linked

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@Lee4591628

SEO stands on three basis:


Content (what you write/publish)
Relations (how others give you importance)
Structure (how you make your website readable/crawlable)


All three are important. Really important.

Sitemaps are a best practice, in order to keep your content indexed in one unique place. But please, make this in a smart way.

Make only ONE xml sitemap and derive the HTML sitemap from it.

Closing this question, please note that any website where you do log in to interact isn't really intended to be indexed by crawlers. They are made to be used, not just read (do you think google, yahoo, bing, ask... worry about SEO? Facebook, Friendster, Twitter, Youtube, Orkut...).

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@Alves908

The sitemap also tells search engines when a page last changed. This allows the engines to re-index the page quicker without having to make a request for all pages on your site.

So if your site has lots of pages that change often in ways that need re-indexing, then you do need a site map.

However remember that the world got by for many years without site maps and that they are only a "hint" to a search engine.

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@Connie744

You don't have to use sitemap if your site can reach traffic like Facebook or Twitter. But if you want to make your user more easier to find their needs you should put it in your site.

Based on my experience, search engine try to find the sitemap to know your site structure, but some expert said that the new release of new engine stop did it.

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@Gonzalez347

The sitemap is only important if you want to be able to submit a list of all your pages to search engines and request that they get indexed. If having your content show up in search engines isn't important to you, or if everything on your site is immediately linked from twitter or other popular places on the web and found and indexed by search engines without a sitemap, then you won't suffer by not having one.

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@Lengel546

There is no rule that says a sitemap file should live in the root of a website and be named in a special way. Any engine that allows you to submit XML sitemaps allows you to specify the URL for the sitemap. I usually put them in a /sitemaps/ folder for convenience because I usually have several sitemaps. One for videos, one for news articles and one for general content. And actually one more that points to those three sitemaps so that I only have to submit one file.

Sometimes search engines don't find all of your content so a sitemap file is a way for you to say "this is all of my content, please cross reference with it when spidering". Engines aren't required to do this and there's no guarantee that they will but at least you tried. I have done experiments where I created a file that is only accessible through the sitemap file and it did appear in the search results.

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