Can a sitemap make your website more attractive to a search engine web crawler? That’s the theory going around after a few successful trial runs which have been carried out recently.
A popular SEO blog has recently put together a trial where they added on a sitemap to six posts and left a further six posts without a sitemap. Their research found that when they submitted a sitemap with the post it took the Google bot 14 minutes to visit it and 245 minutes for the Yahoo! bot to visit.
Compare this to when they didn’t add a sitemap which took 1375 and 1773 minutes for Google and Yahoo! bots respectively to visit them.
This new evidence has impressed people who haven’t been great believers of inserting a sitemap in the past. These people have now had a change of mind and are looking at doing it more and more.
Google has been pouring a significant amount of time into the tools needed to obtain the data to help improve search results, which is also helping to further fuel this thinking.
The SEO blog who researched the results also looked at random other websites to see if this would apply and the results constantly came back on the positive side.
They detected for problems which would restrict the search bot but none were found, which helped lead them to the conclusion that the results were because of the sitemap.
So how can this help you as a business? As well as letting the search engine bots know the URL’s on your website it can be an excellent way of getting your sitemap indexed quickly. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it will act as a doorway page and be detrimental towards the SEO process either so that fear is taken away.
It will help the Google search bot to know exactly when new pages have been added and suggest that they are scanned as soon as possible.
There is still much more research to be completed into this but the results so far show that there is potential for this to be an added bonus for SEO practices.
