Is it true that having a link in the footer for your sitemap will help your SEO score? Also will having a terms of service will increase your sites ranking? Just curious. Heard rumor of this recently.
no...there is nothing like putting a link for sitemap in the footer will help the seo score. having TOS and Privacy Policy will help Google determine that your site is not fake and is a legitimate one.
NO google will not determine your site is more legitimate because of a privacy policy and a tos - anyone can make these up and is not taken into consideration.
How do you know either way? It seems like it could be legit, I mean having a TOS, sitemap link and contact form make the site more legit. I dunno though.
Having a TOS and Privacy Policy is important to your business and protecting it. It may be things your website needs to be in compliance with state and federal laws depending on the type of site you are operating. However Google does not care if you have these things or not. I PROMISE YOU ALL GOOGLE WANTS IS QUALITY CONTENT AND FOR YOU TO BUILD YOUR SITE FOR YOUR VISITORS...NOT FOR THEM.
TOS, Privacy Policy have nothing to do with rankings. These might be used for other purposes like informing visitors but I don't think these affect rankings. On that note, many sites with TOS are doing pretty good on Google. Having a link to your sitemap, as Sulumits Retsambew does, only increases crawl rate which again is important for proper indexing. But, it does not affect rankings.
I think that..having the site map in the footer is not that important but having a site map for your website is important. and about the privacy policies i don't think they are any where related to search rankings or even PR
Also noticed, that link to sitemap gives faster google indexing and more rankings. For example you have main page pr5 (index), and a lot of other pages also with some pr. They are linking to sitemap and gives to it ~pr3. And sitemap linking back to other pages, it helps to save high pr aroud site. Just my 5 cents
Having a well-composed sitemap that gets updated each time you add new content (I just use cron jobs to analyze my website logs and files to generate mine) will significantly help you with search engines. You can use Google's sitemap script to periodically (say once a day) update your sitemap files; there are also plugins for WordPress and other blogging platforms that will automatically regenerate your sitemaps and ping the search engines every time you add new content. Good luck!
I also find that a self updating sitemap helps keeping google updated with latest posts on some of my forums.
If I have a self-updating sitemap and submitted it to google, should I ping google evertime I post something new?
Sitemap or TOS is no harm, so go ahead and make it , never mind the main page link it may help you a bit so place it...
I think you need not to link your sitemap in footer. Just as long there is 1 link to it reachable by the spiders. Also another xml sitemap and submit it to the Google webmaster tools. Hope this will help