Breaking SEO Myths: XML Sitemaps Will Boost Your Ranking

Breaking SEO Myths is a series of posts where we are dedicated to breaking apart myths, and misconceptions in SEO to help webmasters optimize their websites correctly and to not be fooled by "SEO Experts".

This first installment in the series takes apart a myth that states having an XML Sitemap will boost your website rankings. This is technically a myth because its premise is incorrect. 

An XML sitemap is a basically a giant collection of your website's pages that you submit to Google so it can crawl your website. Additionally, it uses the sitemap as a way to discover pages on your website and it uses it to know if you have newly published pages. 

Now while this sounds like it will boost your rankings is actually a misconception. Technically speaking it's not going to boost rankings as Google can discover pages on your website through other means. Additionally, you might not have known that Google also accepts RSS feeds, and even text-based HTML documents as sitemaps so there is nothing special about XML sitemaps. 

In fact, a website with a solid internal link structure might not need an XML sitemap at all! However, we strongly recommend submitting one as its the easiest way for Google to identify pages for the index, if you're building a simple HTML based website creating an HTML document with a link of links is also an option that can help Google find pages on your website. 

One particular issue that occurs is that when your site does not have any form of sitemap your time to index increases dramatically especially if you have a lot of new content going onto your website all the time.

Conclusion

While XML sitemaps will by no means increase your rankings it makes sense to submit Google a list of your website's pages so it will be able to discover and crawl them efficiently. While you can get away with not having an XML sitemap, it's highly discouraged as it can make getting new pages indexed by Google considerably harder. 

Additionally, you don't need an XML sitemap, in fact, your able to submit simple HTML pages filled with links, you can even submit your RSS feed and Google will process it like any other sitemap.