How Sitemaps improve your Google Search Ranking

Abbie T
2 min readAug 3, 2020

--

Improving Search Engine Optimisation by providing a SiteMap.

A sitemap with blue boxes and pink background, the kind submitted to Google Search so crawlers find your website

Submitting a sitemap will improve your rankings in Google Search, especially if you are a new website with few if any backlinks. When deciding which websites to list for a users search query Google looks at websites with authority and websites with sitemaps. It is website owners who provide sitemaps.

A sitemap is a filepage where you provide information about the pages, videos and other files on your site and how each relates to the other.

A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you want to be visited on your site. A sitemap also provides information about the relevance and quality of the pages and files, for example, when a page was last updated, how often the page is changed, any alternate language versions of the page etc.

You should provide Google with a sitemap if:

-your site is new and has no backlinks. Web crawlers crawl the web and discover sites by moving from one link to another. If no external sites are linking to you, Google won’t know you exist unless you let them know via a sitemap.

-your content does not link to other content on your site — that is you do not have much internal linking. If pages on your site do not link easily to one another and many pages are isolated, you can list
each page you want visited on a sitemap so Google does not overlook these pages.

-your site has a lot of rich media content. Google takes into account information about video and image content on a site to help in its search listing.
Your sitemap video entry would specify information such as the video running time, category and age appropriateness rating.
Your sitemap image entry can include the image subject matter, type and licence.

-your site is very large. Web crawlers may overlook any new or recently
updated pages on your site if it is very large, letting them know
that information is there will help get those pages ranked.

Google will use your sitemap to more intelligently crawl your site.
Most sites benefit from having a sitemap, and Google does not
penalize you for providing one.

--

--