Site maps - How important are they?

Sitemap is an essential part of on page optimization and submitting it in webmaster tool is really helpful for Google to crawl your webpages frequently.
 
If Google can go to a site and see the entire site using the navigation on the page, then in many cases, a site map wouldn't provide much help. If you have pages that are deep linked, then that's where a sitemap comes in handy. We're taking sites with 50+ pages, ecommerce sites and active blogs etc.

The sitemap just makes it easier for Google (and Bing) to understand where the pages are located. They'll still crawl your site and discover things on their own, but the sitemap is providing them a list of "here, I want you pat attention and look at these pages".

With all that said, if you're using WordPress, Joomla, or other systems, there are plugins for generating a sitemap automatically, and free, so set it up and submit it - it doesn't hurt. Larger sites, it's required, but I add it to every site we build, even a site with only 3 pages :)
 
Sitemaps are not required for smaller websites. If you have a site with many pages, or media content then sitemaps are required.

Sitemaps usually makes bots from search engines to located all the links and external links on the site. It help the bots to crawl faster.
 
Yes, sitemap is very important for any website. It really helps search engine crawlers to know more about your website and it also provides great help in indexing your website in search engines quite quickly.
 
A sitemap informs search engines that changed in the websites, and the search engine gets potentially changes indexed faster. With a sitemap, Google can decipher what page is the main URL, which may help resolve specific canonical issues
 
An update on sitemaps;

In May 2020, Google's John Mueller hopped in a Reddit thread to discuss sitemaps, and in particular "Don't Create Sitemaps Manually" - let the CMS do the work.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com...-dont-create-a-sitemap-manually/370176/#close

Yesterday, Nov 10th, 2020, John was on Twitter talking about Sitemaps, and made the statement "Making a sitemap file automatically seems like a minimal baseline for any serious website, imo."
here's that twitter feed - https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1326114811638378497
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-xml-sitemaps-baseline-30405.html


The "minimal baseline" is a critical part of the statement. Essentially, if you want your website to be taken serious, you should have a sitemap.

This doesn't mean you HAVE to have a sitemap, but if you're doing anything serious or with volume, then a sitemap helps Google.

I still stand behind the "no need for a sitemap if you have 5 pages" statement that I've made over the years. If Google can find your home page, and you have the other 4 pages linked from that page, you should be perfectly fine. That said, if you have a larger volume of pages, you should have a sitemap.
 
It's so little effort and costs nothing that, whether it is particularly useful or not, surely it's worth having a sitemap just in case it gives any benefit.

bigredseo said:
With all that said, if you're using WordPress, Joomla, or other systems, there are plugins for generating a sitemap automatically
Click to expand...

Since 5.5, WordPress actually creates a sitemap now as part of core and it's enabled by default.
 
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