Sitemap.xml - The most Overrated Search Engine Indexing factor

Ask an SEO next door to tell you reason for the poor ranking and indexing of your website of your website, the first statement he will come up is - “Cmmon, how will your website rank, when it doesn’t even have a sitmep.xml file”. Yes, we all know that sitemap.xml helps to improve indexing of a website, but is it actually as important as the most community hypes about it? Certainly not. Infact, I think that XML sitemaps is the most overrated SEO tactic ever. Sitemaps don’t really solve the problems (I mean all the problems) where indexing and crawlability are concerned. What I mean here is that if you have a website that has 150 pages and the Search Engines can only access 30 of them, don’t think that uploading a sitemap.xml is a sure shot way to index 100% of your pages. It’s very much like applying a 2 inch band aid after open heart surgery.

By now, you must be wondering - “If not sitemap.xml, then what’s the cure?” - I believe instead of just spoon feeding the Search Engines with pages with the help of a sitemap.xml file in a hope that it will pick all the listed pages one day, you must rather focus on making the un-indexed pages better and worthy in the eyes of Search Engines by improving the content, acquiring better/more links to them, and so forth. When Google, doesn’t indexes some pages on your website, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Search Engines had trouble finding the page, but actually the Search Engines never found those pages worthy of keeping them in its main index. Just because a website doesn’t has a sitemap.xml doesn’t mean search engines wont crawl it unless the website has weak internal linking and information architecture.

Please don’t get me wrong here. I am not against the use of sitemap.xml file but what I want to say is that if your website has indexing problem, don’t just rely on the sitemap.xml as the sole indexing factor. Consolidate the internal linking of your website, use nofollow to control the link juice flow and most important – add quality content on the pages and get quality back links for those pages.