Can sitemaps affect google rankings?

Does it matter if you have a sitemap or not on an ordinary blog? I don't have a sitemap, been to lazy to add one and havn't really understood the reason to why I should... but perhaps is it good from an SEO point of view?

 

Not really it just help in getting the pages indexed faster.Nothing much

 

Was curious about this also, I have blogs and in webmaster tools it says to links a rss feed in place of a sitemap do i need both?

 

I think it does. I moved up to #3 in a keyword and later that day I dropped back down to #4 and I noticed Google found an error in my sitemap

 

Yes Sitemap is very important part of the website. A site map is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. Sitemap work as guide to visitors & search engine bots to find all pages on website easily. it have so many benefites such as
Navigation purposes
Conveying your site's theme
Site optimization purposes
Organization and relevance

 

Basically all it does is notifies Google and other sites that A) Your sites been updated (if it's automatic and new posts are added to it) B) It Keeps all or most of your pages, posts, categories etc. - just one link away from the index page and this means that they're no deeper than 3 clicks from your index page - which is a rule of thumb by Google.

 

I´ll make a sitemap and see what happens with the rankings for my main keywords. How long time can you expect that it takes before google notice a sitemap and change rankings?

 

Submit it in google webmaster tools here... https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en - it will be crawled immediately... it might not change at all or with the sitemap added to your site (be sure to add a link to it on your index page) you may experience more pages indexed in Google and each page indexed in your site equals more internal links to your pages - so based on that theory; you may see a slight increase in rankings.

 

though its not much more than indexing the pages faster but it is good for ranking..u should try it once..

 

I just noticed that I already had a sitemap submitted in google webmasters tools... but I updated it at least

 

I think it not important, it just help in getting the pages indexed faster

 

Simple answer is yes. Sitemap with the right frequencies will help to crawl your site correctly and get indexed.

 

That's important, it keeps your links closer to the index page, it gets you indexed faster, notifies Google of new posts and it's good for seo... you can also create image site maps, video site maps and regular site maps...

 

Frequently updated sitemap will certainly boost your website ranking. It helps for faster indexing of webpages since you can set the frequency for crawl and hence once you add any new page to your website it will get crawled and thus indexed which helps in SEO.

 

So you should link to the sitemap from the index page?

 

Yes - so other search engines can find your site map, if you use Google webmaster tools - then you'll automatically ping Google of updates, wordpress for example will ping sites about new updates, posts etc. But a HTML site wont ping Google on it's own... so having a link in the footer is good to let know S.E's that one does exist and it also keeps your posts and pages within your site map - one step away from your index page & that's what Google wants - content to be just a click away from your index page and not hard to find.

 

Im a keen user of wordpress and the first thing i do is install a plugin that generates me a sitemap. I've always used them and wouldn't dream of not.

 

sitemaps are important for many websites.
If you have news article site or a videos site then you will need a sitemap for indexing your videos on Google Videos search and Google News search

 

It is more advantage if you have a sitemap because your site will indexed faster. but it is not really important. you can do seo without having it.

 

Your sitemap is helpful for google to crawl your pages to immediately without going to your all site reading. Crawler only read your sitemap and go to the next website, because of sitemap has contain all the website url's then it has no need to go through website and read all website whenever it comes to your website. Then i just want to say that sitemap is most important to crawl website fast.