Importance of having site-map

The concept of site-map is not new , in the early days site-maps primarily used for the humans visitors. Help to search engine is a mere side benefit. HTML site-maps are organized collection of website links and their descriptions.Over the years search engine engine realized the importance of having site-maps and in 2005 google creates own google site-map protocol. In 2006 google site-map protocol was renamed as XML site-map protocol.

site-maps are not mandatory for a website any search will not penalize if there is no site-map on the site. But presence of a site-map offers some extra benefits

Reasons for having sitemap:

Crawl augmentation:

A site-map submitted to google ensures that google knows about your all URLs.

This is specially helpful when your content is not easily discoverable by crawler .But this does not guarantee that your URL get indexed or crawled.

Poor Linking Structure :

Sites with poor linking structure suffers from poor indexing. Orphan pages ,deep links, search engine traps are responsible for poor indexing. Use of site-map gives solution to this problem , at least gives time to resolve this problem.

Crawling frequency:

One of the biggest benefits of using sitemap in timely crawls and recrawls of your site . The site-map lets you to tell crawler that how often they should read each page. Sites using site-map tends to b crawled faster on yahoo and google.

Content Ownership:

It is best for your content to get indexed faster as possible, this ensures that you are the owner of the content. It ensures that copycat sites wont get benefit of your content.

Page Priority :

XML site-map protocol lets you to assign specific priority for each url . Giving search engine suggestions about the importance of the page is empowering -depends on how search engine treats this value.

Large sites:

Large sites which contains thousand of pages suffer indexing due to deep linking. So it becomes important to use site-maps .