Sitemap Clarifications from Google\'s Sitemap FAQs

Sitemap Clarifications from Google’s Sitemap FAQs

published by Dan in SEO | SEO Tools with No Comments

The concept of sitemaps can be confusing, especially since there are two kinds of sitemaps -HTML sitemap and XML sitemaps. I have already written about sitemaps several times and did two posts on common misconceptions about sitemaps. Listed below though are more information I got from Google’s Sitemap FAQs article. Note that I did not include information I already discussed in my previous post.

• The priority field in the metadata does not affect the ranking of your website’s pages. Setting the priority will simply help Google determine which pages are more important compared to the other pages in your site. If you cannot decide priority or are confused about this it is better to simply not assign priority at all. Assigning pages the same priority will result in all the pages seen as equally important, just the same as if you didn’t assign any priority.
• Sitemap metadata is useful so that Google will know more about your pages but if you do not understand them it is ok to leave them blank.
• Submitting a sitemap will NOT get your site penalised. Instances where a site is penalised after submitting a sitemap is purely coincidental and happened for a different reason. If you are using spamming/scrapping techniques then it IS foolish to submit a sitemap and help Google find your bad bad site though.
• You can put your sitemap in any Webmaster Tools-verified site due to Google’s sitemap cross-submission. Obviously, this is true only for Google and not other search engines.

to be continued…

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