If you own websites and you have been trying hard to get it ranked on search engines then you must have heard that you should submit the sitemap of your website on Google and other search engines. So, is it really helpful? Is there any value in doing it? A lot of website owners find it confusing to decide. To help you, here we are exploring these questions and more in our exam of XML and HTML sitemaps.

What Is an Off-Site or Submitted Sitemap?

A Sitemap as the name suggests is a list of the pages on your site. By submitting a sitemap you can ensure that the search engines know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may be hard to find by typical crawling process.

Myths and Facts About XML Sitemap Submission

Lately, there has been a lot of discussion about why a website should or should not submit their sitemap to Google’s webmaster tools. So, let’s try and know more about it by debunking some myths about submitting your sitemap.

– Submitting Your Sitemap Will Assist Crawl Your Website?

Crawl rate and crawl frequency is not based on URLs submitted and URLs indexed. It is more dependent on page rank, inbound links, page size and clean code.

– Submitting a Sitemap Will Assist Your Rankings?

It is a myth. It has no relation to your rankings, because being indexed and being ranked are completely different things. Rankings are more influenced by on-site content, well structured and well SEO pages and inbound links.

Google says: “Submit a sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover”

Experts say that if you don’t create websites that can be indexed and crawled you are doing harm to your online business.

– By Submitting Your Website to Google Webmaster Tools It Will Get Indexed Automatically?

It is a myth. Even Google says:  “submitting a Sitemap does not guarantee indexing”

Reasons you should not submit your Sitemap to Google?

– It gives Google the URLs without having to find them through typical natural methods like inbound and internal links which assists with rankings.

– Submitting your website’s sitemap will help you cover indexing problems. So if there are issues like Ajax, Flash, poor internal linking, poor navigation etc. then it will help.

– Google doesn’t need to come to your website to find pages and thus the crawling frequency of your website might decrease.