Until 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!

Nicki Hicks
Flirting with SE bots with Sitemaps