Reminder to use an XML sitemap

[bernard]

I've been adding content to my secondary site and was confused as to why it wasn't ranking and even not being indexed.

I discovered the answer to the indexing issue quickly, I had forgotten to nofollow custom posts (from a feed), so my crawl/index budget was spent on these posts.

Then I submitted an XML sitemap just hours ago and not only are all the posts now indexed, one of the new posts jumped straight top the number 1 spot! Granted I already ranked like 3rd for the term, but this was an optimized landing page (widgets vs red widgets).

So if you haven't submitted an XML sitemap, go ahead and so now, it might give surprising and quick results.

 

[Future State]

There is absolutely no better thing for SEO than a sitemap, in my opinion.

Not only can you tell Google which pages you want indexed, you can get them crawled regularly, re-crawled at any time by updating your posts, you can use it to compare to what's actually indexed and find bloat or errors, you can get all kinds of data from Search Console with it.

There are so many people that don't generate sitemaps, try to use HTML sitemaps, generate one without their knowledge and never submit it to Search Console, etc. And then complain about the most basic stuff like crawling and indexing. Sitemaps really are like SEO 101 and it's amazing how many "SEO's" don't know about them or think they're inconsequential.

It's like a dungeon crawling video game. Playing with a map that shows you all the rooms and what's in them and which rooms not to go in is much easier for Google and much better you.

 

[Kookjay]

I have 3 sitemaps - the sitemap index, then post and page sitemaps, is it worth having all 3 in my robots.txt?

Currently I only have page and post sitemaps in there (I can't remember why but remember reading somewhere this way should be better?)

https://www.site.com/sitemap_index.xml
https://www.site.com/page-sitemap.xml
https://www.site.com/post-sitemap.xml

 

[Ryuzaki]

@Kookjay, if you want to direct Google or whoever to your sitemap and you have a sitemap index, just do Sitemap: https://site.com/sitemap_index.xml.

There's no need to list all three. They may only acknowledge one (for all we know) so you might as well just send them to the top level and let them discover all of the sitemaps from there. They know how to deal with it.

Of course, none of this is an alternative to actually submitting your sitemap index to Search Console.