I saw a comment on another blog from a new Webmaster who was frustrated about his lack of traffic. He recently submitted a sitemap to Google and Yahoo and wondered why his traffic hadn’t increased. So he titled his blog comment, “Sitemaps Don’t Increase Traffic!”.

There’s a lot of misunderstandings when it comes to sitemaps. I think many people believe it’s an instant way to improve their search engine rankings, even though none of the search engines that accept sitemaps have ever confirmed such a thing.

In fact, Google flat out tells you in their FAQ’s they have no impact on your rankings.

So Why Bother With Sitemaps?

There are a couple of good reasons to bother with them. First of all, it’s a quick way to inform the engines of your new content and enables the spiders to pick up your content as soon as it’s published.

Second, I believe having a sitemaps shows a bit of Webmaster responsibility which could give your site some credibility. Now there’s no proof of this, but a part of me believes taking the time to generate a sitemap lets the engines know you are a more serious Webmaster compared to someone who doesn’t bother.

Not to mention, creating and submitting them won’t cost you a cent. So why wouldn’t you create a sitemap? You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. Just don’t expect an instant explosion of traffic just because you have one.

Achieving good search engine rankings still largely depends on your content and how many quality inbound links pointing to your site. Nothing has changed there. But having a sitemap is still a great way to get your site talking to the engine spiders and letting them know about your new content as soon as its published.

And I don’t know about you, but any time I get a chance to “talk” to Google about my site, I take advantage of it.

Learn more about creating and submitting Google Sitemaps.
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