Sitemap

I have a query is that, sitemap is essential for every website. Does its presence/absence effect the ranking of the website or in other factors.

 

Hi Megan, one of the first things Google does when ranking a web site is to look at the structure of the site. They check to see if the navigation is easy to follow, if there are alt tags on images, if there is a robots.txt file, if there is a sitemap.html or sitemap.xml file, and other "quality" factors. I don't believe that any of these are negative factors, you won't be dropped down in the rankings if you don't have them. But they are all positive factors, you will not get first page placement without these.

Specifically on the sitemap.xml file, Google uses this to know which pages to index and how often to recheck the pages. If they don't find this file then they will try to figure it out on their own using the site's natural navigation. So by having a sitemap.xml file you can control or at least influence how the googlebot scans your site. And, since Google only allows a certain amount of time for the googlebot for any site, having a sitemap.xml file will speed up the process and let Google index more of your pages. After all, isn't that what we want?

Using a combination of a sitemap.xml file, a robots.txt file, robots meta tag, and password protected folders you can have a great amount of control over how the googlebot indexes your site.

 

Hi Megan, I just uploaded a video from my SEO training title that explains sitemaps. Here is the link

 

It is hard to setup a fixed rule, but the larger the website the more a sitemap can help with indexing