XML is important, it helps search engines crawling your site and articles. But you don't have to own one, it is just make life easier in my opinion.
Xml sitemaps plays an important role when your site navigation is not search engine friendly and it becomes difficult for search engines to index all the pages on the site. The sitemap.xml files accommodate almost all the urls in the website and it makes the search engines easy to crawl these pages.
Xml sitemaps has a very important function to set priorities for each page, which divides pagerank and link juice, so it is very important.
no its not at all important. Its only we think that google will crawl sitemap XML, but I have 1 website withou sitemap and its doing well with 9 keywords in google, doing well means its in top 3
Check this for more information about importance of sitemap http://webupon.com/marketing/why-is-a-sitemap-important-to-seo/
XML sitemaps are very important for search engines to find every page on your site. At times, it takes search engines ages before they discover all your site pages, so it helps to speed the process by providing an xml sitemap.
Hi Friend, According to my experience xml sitemap is very beneficial because our websites pages are cached by search engine through the xml sitemap .
I recently started using a sitemap plugin for blogger, it seems to work well! The truth is Google doesn't guarantee that they'll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, by using Sitemaps, the contents incurred in the said Sitemap to learn more about your wep site's structure which will improjve the crawling schedule.
Yes its very important according to my personal experience xml sitemaps helps search engine to crawl our web pages fast.
XML site maps are NOT all that important or useful other than three situations: 1) You're trying to get a site indexed that has no backlinks. Submitting an XML sitemap will get the search engines to crawl your site. It does NOT however guaratee that your pages will be indexed. 2) You have a site that is not crawlable for some reason. Using an XML sitemap will help the search engines know about and discover your URLs on your site that they could not find due to your site's crawlablity issues. 3) You have a site with 100s of thousands or millions of URLs. Using an XML sitemap allows you to set priorities of your URLs so Google and other engines know which URLs you feel are most important and should be indexed first before indexing other URLs on your site. Other than these 3 situations, XML sitemaps do absolutely nothing. They do NOT increase the number of pages indexed (other than in sites where crawlability is an issue). They don't help your rankings. The average site really does not even need an XML sitemap, even one with 10s of the thousands of pages... so long as they have a good site architecture that is crawlable with good navigation and interlinking structures.
Not anymore, well not with google. But other search engines still in love with them. Just have one, it will not hurt your website.