Is Google XML Sitemaps important?

[vgkumar]

Surely google is clever enough to index all your pages by just following all of your sites links. Does it really speed up or help with spiders crawling your site ?

 

[iAmDjMAD]

indeed it is important.

 

[chris hoppus]

i'd imagine it's important at first when your website doesn't carry any authority or SE weight, in the instance that it's new and pages need to be indexed for the first time and a sitemap would definitely help with that. but once you get your PR up and organic traffic flowing about, google bots would have no problem crawling your pages. that is if you have a proper link structure. which isn't too difficult to setup.

to summarize, sitemaps do help, but you don't necessarily need them. you can provide both XML and HTML sitemaps, neither would hurt. Matt Cutts stopped using an XML sitemap and only has an HTML sitemap.

 

[AndyLaw]

I believe sitemaps are important for new sites or sites that have new pages added daily.

 

[MikeIn]

I think I should say yes, thought I no more run a website/ active website,
But if you know Google prefers sitemap, I think because they make their job easy.


M

 

[XAXA]

Yes they are. If you have no sitemap google has to search your whole site for links.
If you have a sitemap all links are at one place and can be scanned.

 

[kingrasukh]

yes sitemape are very importants for web sites..

 

[AlstonB]

Hi,
Sitemaps are important to get better search results in Google. It is better to provide both XML and HTML sitemaps.

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attention tracking

 

[turnpoint]

I launch several 100s of pages in batches because of my business, and have found that indexing these batches goes a lot faster when you add sitemaps

 

[lover2share]

Yah you have to add a sitemap so google can easily crawl through your site and better if you can use both XML and HTML sitemaps...

 

[mikepetersen]

Yes sitemap.xml is important for a site. By that xml sitemap Google bot crawls your site through a single link for which the pages which are submitted in a xml site map may index at a time.

 

[NiteRider]

no dout about this.Sitemaps has huge importance to get a good search result in Google.