Do Sitemaps Actually Work?
While many people claim that having a xml Google sitemap can help a website get crawled faster, John H. Gohde has yet to have demonstrated that using one will result in any type of a positive benefit. Part of the problem has been that a sitemap has to be updated immediately and automatically. Having located an impressive sitemap plugin, John is giving sitemaps another try.
Do Sitemaps Actually Work?
John H. Gohde sure has not seen any proof that a sitemap has helped any of his websites. More than likely, all the glowing reports one reads about getting crawled faster are nothing but superstitious nonsense.
Considering that Google will index a pinged post within minutes of a post being published, a sitemap can take weeks and weeks to produce any desired results, if at all. It takes so long in fact that it is entirely debatable whether Google is paying any attention to your sitemap at all. A webpage being updated in Google could merely have been coincidence, since the results following the use of a sitemap simply take too long. If pages updated in a sitemap were in fact updated in Google within a few days, then that would be suggestive of an effect. But when the time delay is a couple of weeks or more, then there is absolutely no indication whatsoever that sitemaps actually work.
The previous Wordpress sitemap plugin that John H. Gohde had tested was way too incomplete to even use. But, recently John came across the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, version 3.1.0.1, By Arne Brachhold. This plugin covers all of the necessary options, and then some.
This plugin provides for the selection of specific Sitemap content, change frequencies, and priorities by the following options.
- homepage
- posts
- pages
- categories
- archives
- tags
- author pages
- and whether or not it is “paged” (i.e., consists of more than one page)
It even provides for excluding specific posts or pages by ID number. All together, these plugin options allow bloggers to recreate manually what they have done with meta tags being displayed in the Header template.
Since theoretically use of a sitemap is supposed to help, John is currently testing this sitemap plugin to see if any actually benefits can be attributed to it, even though most of his posts are being pinged and indexed within minutes of their being published.
