The Venture Skills Blog

There have been a couple of posts about the validity of site maps as a SEO technique the latest post from Rand at SEOmoz but why has the golden boy lost his glow?

Basically the argument goes, a search engine crawls a site in an organic way, it discovers pages through links internal and external and weighs those links accordingly. By submit a site map a web master is overriding this basic checking service, If a page couldn’t be crawled it would be noticed and could be rectified, however now any page in the site map will be crawled even if its an orphan. Is this a serious problem?

Yes and No, It is a problem if pages are orphaned and the site owner is unaware of the issue, it is not an issue if the page is a deliberate orphan (such as a landing page) but you still want it searched now most landing pages will have in bound external links after all that’s the point, but some may not for what ever reason. The second is a well designed site will have the necessary design structure to stop orphaning occurring, most modern site, uses categories or tags as means of structure and most CMS build these navigational aids in by default.

But I think the biggest problem is that SEO do not use the sitemap fully and so think its all about first time submission, sitemaps are powerful tools, they can help determine duplicate content issues (sitemap URL seem to have priority in duplicate content), They allow a site owner to specify priorities for a given page (which if used correctly is a very useful and powerful tool). But its important to remember that that’s all it is a tool which when combined with robots.txt and htaccess provide the three basic tools for organising the way robots see your site, to remove 1 of the 3 main tools because you can’t spot orphan pages seems a little rash does it not?

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