This tip has been brought with version 2.3.7 of The SEO Framework.
Nowadays, sitemaps are a tool for Search Engines, not for users. This means that styling the sitemap just adds unnecessary resource usage.
Having a sitemap available will make sure your content is reached out faster to the Search Index since the Search Engines know what has changed and when. So be sure to enable the lastmod feature if you frequently post new posts or pages!
No sitemap? Not a problem! Search Engines will just follow links within your site to find new pages. This default behavior will also continue with a sitemap available, so no pages are missed even if your sitemap has reached its limit.
Is it worth it to rely creating high quality content and using facebook ads to create brand awareness and get sites to quote you and link to your site?
Hi Garrett,
High quality content is always a must, as it’s quite self-explanatory. Users want content they care to read; even if it’s merely “click-bait”.
Facebook ads are a great way to start!
But please be aware that when trying to fetch “likes” for your Facebook page can have ugly results when your page is up-and-running. This video from Veritasium explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
Backlinks are something you should definitely strive for. But as long as — or rather especially if — they’re related to the subject of your site. More SEO tips on this will be published soon :)
Cheers!
Sitemap really helps search engine to find all your website pages. If in case you cant find a specific page in Google,in that case using the fetch tool in Google search console also can be extremely helpful in indexing a particular page.
Having a sitemap, especially if you are using WordPress is an extremely effective tool. Since the sitemap will dynamically update, it makes it easy to index hundreds or even thousands of pages directly into Google’s index if needed.
I just recently build a glossary on my site. The first thing I did afterwards was refresh my sitemap and I almost immediately saw a boost in rank. While yes, that is due to a lot of relevant content being added to Google’s index, the sitemap made the process much quicker by making it a one step process.
XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site’s pages—this is important because Google ranks pages not just the website itself. There is no downside of having an XML Sitemap and having one can improve your SEO, so we highly recommend them.
Would you really trust NOT building a sitemap and just assuming that Google or any other search engine will crawl and find new content? I think that sitemaps are essential to any good SEO campaign. If you’re trying to rank your site and/or multiple pages of a site, a sitemap isn’t optional. It is a requirement.
I’m not saying you can’t rank a site without a sitemap, there’s no doubt that having one will make a big difference.
What do you think?
Sitemaps are essential for speedy indexing through annotating what has recently changed (i.e. through “lastmod”). Beyond that, it’s all about the content and on-page optimizations.
That said, it’s still not a ranking signal; although content improvements (when seen and indexed) can boost your ranking.
From my understanding, Search engines can compare before/after states when crawling pages — with or without a sitemap. Alternatively, they could just re-parse the content and drop what was found at the last crawl for the initiated page.
In any case, you can trust search engines to spot the differences automatically without the help from a sitemap.