Duncan Morris at SEOmoz gives a pretty good discussion on the pros and cons of sitemapping your website. Here’s the lowdown on the nitty gritty from a business perspective:

Competitive intelligence. If you are telling the search engines the relative priority of all of your pages, you can bet this information will be of interest to your competitors. I know of no way of protecting your sitemap so only the search engines can access it.

How much do you want your competitors to know about you? Anything you let Google know will also be known by your competition. Do you really want to disclose information like the priority of each of your web pages?

I think Duncan’s list of cons is a lot more interesting than his list of pros. Perhaps the most compelling argument against sitemaps is the architecture argument. A sitemap will hide any crawlability issues you have by making inaccessible links accessible to the search engines. If you have a problem then you likely will never know about it. So your XML sitemap may actually be a bandaid for a problem than needs surgery. Personally, I think if you have a small website then you don’t need an XML sitemap. If you have a large website then I like Duncan’s advice: Work out all of your crawlability issues first then once you are satisfied with where your site it at, add a sitemap if you want one. Most websites probably don’t need them.

Caroline Melberg
Melberg Marketing
Blue Chip Marketing Tips
Small Business Mavericks

Tags: crawlability, seo, website architecture, xml sitemap

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 10:05 am and is filed under SEO for Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.