SEO Expert Warns Against Using Google Sitemaps

by Scott Allen

In a controversial post on the SEOmoz daily blog, entitled “My Advice on Google Sitemaps - Verify, but Don’t Submit“, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert Rand Fishkin expresses his point of view that web site rankings may actually suffer from submitting xml sitemaps (Sitemaps.org protocol sitemaps) to Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

It sounds bizarre, almost counterintuitive, but many of best minds in the world of SEO appear to be rallying around the idea that submitting a feed to Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Site Explorer is actually a terrible idea.

One question immediately arises, who are these “best minds in the world of SEO”? I have not seen this particular opinion expressed publicly anywhere else, at least not yet. If there are other great SEO minds that agree with Rand on this, I would love to hear their input and will gladly link to any posts or articles they publish.

One of Rand’s main points is that:

Why are so many SEOs recommending against submitting a feed to Sitemaps? Because the data you get from the natural crawl IS valuable, and submitting an XML feed (or any other format) can cause that natural process of inclusion to be lost. If a page isn’t accessible, doesn’t carry enough link juice, or lacks unique, valuable content, I want to know about it, and the Sitemaps process can be a hindrance.

So, he’s saying that using the sitemaps submission process may mask architectural or content quality problems in the web site. Granted, that may be so, but in my opinion, a good web designer or design team will easily overcome this.

Many of the commenters on Rand’s post believe it to be linkbait because of the controversial nature of its content. This may be true, and if so, then it may appear that I have fallen for it by linking to his post. However, I’ve been thinking about it for a few days. I held off on posting right away because I wanted to run some tests before weighing in on the topic.

When I first read the post, I had a mixed reaction - part of me agreed, but part didn’t. As I’ve been thinking about this and evaluating test results for the last few days, I first thought I may be coming around to his point of view. After all, as SEO’s, we all did fine before Google Sitemaps was around, and on the surface it seems that it caters to less experienced webmasters and sites with poorer structure, which is consistent with his points.

However, submitting to Google Sitemaps will get a site indexed very quickly, and this is confirmed directly by Google employees. But then again, getting some quality links will also get your site indexed quickly.

I’ve been doing some testing and finding interesting, but mixed results with my sites. It seemed that there was a weekly dip in rankings for one of my sites for a couple days after Google Sitemaps downloaded the sitemap file, then it would float back up after a couple days, until it downloaded the file again. Once I took it out this stopped, and everything seemed to be floating a little higher than before. Very strange, and I immediately thought Rand may be onto something. Then I ran the same test on a couple of other sites, and got opposite results. Obviously, such a short test won’t yield any kind of accurate or measurable results, so I’ll need to run longer, more complete tests.

So, the bottom line is, I’m not fully sold yet, and I’m moving back to skeptical, because there are definitely other factors involved in the mixed results I’ve seen. I’ll keep testing though.

I would like to see some blog posts and reactions to Rand’s article by other well-known SEO experts and leaders in the SEO industry. I’m also interested in what readers of this blog think.

Rand, thanks for your article as it has definitely sparked some serious thought and discussion.

What do YOU think? Sound off and post your comments.

Tags:
seo | sitemaps | xml sitemaps | Rand Fishkin | webgeek

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