Ok, so obviously I know the importance of having a sitemap and linking to it from your own website. That is not my question at all. No my question is much more complex and intriguing. But first... A little back story to my question I was doing some competitive link analysis for a client and found that one of their competitors was building links to their sitemap.xml file. This lead me to start to ask a few questions... Having a link to your sitemap would ensure Google crawls your entire site... maybe..? Even so wouldn't your robots.tx file or just submitting the xml sitemap in google search console do the same thing quicker and easier? Is there actually any value in external link building to your sitemap? Being that this is the first time I have come across this and I don't ever remember reading anything about this anywhere (and I've read a lot of SEO blogs!) I thought I'd throw up a quick post asking if anyone has encountered this either. Also hoping someone can add insight as to if this would add any real value and if there would be any benefit to this style link building tactic. Thanks!
Wordpress has plugins for both so it really depends on which one your want or if you want both: XML Sitemap – contains metadata together with the website’s URLs and all the information, including when a particular URL was last updated and how soon the changes occur, etc. Plugin - YoastSEO HTML Sitemap– provides more straightforward navigation for the website’s visitors. Specifies where such pages as Contact Us or Shopping Cart are. It makes your site more user-friendly, helping boost your search engine ranking. Plugin - WP Sitemap Page Both can be installed from the plugin page within your WordPress CMS.
I think that the seo this competitor is using is still stuck in 2005 when google used to use page rank. They are hoping that their sitemap will get a nice page rank, which it will pass to other pages. Nice idea in 2005. Stupid idea now.
Indeed meta keywords, site maps are a thing of the past. It's ok if you have both, but not having them is no big deal. Google will crawl your site with or without.
No, Link Building to your XML Sitemap will not help in SEO. Basically you are not promoting or wanting your XML Site map to rank on Google.
If you do an inbound link to a sitemap, any "link juice" will be divided up and given to all links on the sitemap. Since a site map has a great deal of links, that link juice vaporizes as in goes away. As for the question of getting G to index your site more times. Use GSC>Sitemap to resubmit them. This will accomplish the same thing. However, before you do that, goto GSC. Go to Coverage and click on Excluded. By reviewing this, you will find out why G has indexed the page but will not show it in the SERPs. I just finished 2 solid weeks going over 437 pages that were indexed but excluded. All had some type of error, schema violation, etc. stopping G from displaying it. I fixed over 250 of them so far and G is indexing them.
I think I have done this before and it actually worked out pretty well. Have any of you putting it down or saying its "2005" actually tried it. You want to make sure your website gets indexed properly - this is one way to get it done. Either way its a backlink to a page on your webpage. I see sitemaps as what they are, informational pages that show the internal pages found on your website. A sitemap for people and a sitemap for search engines are two different things. Think of your sitemap being dynamic too, by nature, as pages change/added your sitemaps need to match. This type of housekeeping is tedious but, you want to make sure there are no broken links in any of your sitemap pages.
There are lots of apps available for creating sitemap. But I personally using XENU desktop app for sitemap creation. It is very easy to use, try it out and let me know your view.