How Crucial is a Sitemap When It Comes to Indexing?

Many SEO experts maintain that having a sitemap is crucial if you want your website to be indexed by search engine spiders. The truth behind this is having a sitemap is not at all that crucial to being indexed. Search engines will usually find your site via backlinks from other sites and will of course not discover your website via your own sitemap, which is a part of your website anyway so that if the spider found your sitemap then it must have found it through other means. Therefore a sitemap does NOT get your site discovered.

What a sitemap actually does for your website is it aids or guides the spiders to crawl your sub pages. It helps the spiders discover the other pages within your website that it otherwise might not index.

Even with this function a sitemap isn’t always necessary for search engine spiders to discover the rest of the pages within your website. It isn’t necessary if you use a link net within your pages so that each page has a link to the higher and lower subsections of your website. Having a link net will enable provide the spiders a way to crawl through you website page to page by following each link.

For really large sites though a sitemap is recommended because it will help speed up the spiders’ indexing since all the links are already available in one place and as mentioned earlier will serve as the guide for spiders. It is not essential but useful if you want faster indexing of you considerably large website. This is especially true for websites large business. If your website has very few pages then you can do without one.

By Sparky in Basics, Search engine, Search Engines, Tips

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