Why Your Website Needs a Sitemap….Now!
Thursday, February 5th, 2009Until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sold on the fact that sitemaps were beneficial. I was under the impression that it was sort of a moot point: neither good nor bad. After seeing a post on the SEOmoz blog asking if sitemaps affect crawlers, I was sold.
I installed the WordPress plugin for XML Sitemaps on this blog on Thursday, January 29. These are the crawl stats from my Webmaster Tools account from that day:
Checking again today, one week later, I’ve been waiting out the crawlers on purpose – making no posts until yesterday, and this is what my stats look like now.
Notice the jump. Yesterday’s post is included in this crawl – as the site was cached yesterday. I’ve noticed that the blog will usually be cached a day or two after a post, so could it be crawled so soon because of the sitemap? Perhaps, and it’s definitely something to keep an eye on!