Site map.
Is it really fundamental.
First you need to understand that the site map is simply the list of your rules for a site.
There are various types of site maps and the most commonly used are the following HDL site map.
This is a page designed for the human visitor and it shows a list of links with hierarchies aim to help
the navigator to browse the Web site.
It is often linked in the footer of all pages and helps browsing the web site but is not strictly necessary
XA Mel site map.
Excel is a metal language that has become famous due to the electronic billing used in Italy.
Regarding the site map it allows you to assign a series of attributes to the Urals within a list.
It is not mandatory but it can lead to considerable advantages which we will also see shortly.
Further on the primary function of an Excel site map is to let search engines know how many contents
are present on the Web site by providing info on their location.
All of this information is contained in a dot excel file that speeds up the crawling process and consequently
the indexing of the entire Web site although it is not necessary.
I definitely advise my clients to have an excel site map in some specific cases e commerce Web sites
or portals with a high number of pages blogs which are frequently updated with new articles and Web
sites with many internal links if you do not have a site map your site will still be indexed and will
not suffer many SEO penalties but it may take a lot longer to be indexed and some pages may remain hidden
until the crawler discovers them by itself.
Now let's see what are the main tags that in addition to the header make up an Excel site map luck or
location contains the you are allowed address of the content.
Last mod last modified.
This is optional and indicates the date of the last modification change frac change frequency in the
past it showed how often to visit a web page but it is now a disregarded tag priority on a scale of
zero point zero to one.
In the past the priority indicated the importance of a current page compared to the other web pages.
Remember that the file must be limited to a maximum of fifty thousand yuan ls for 50 megabytes in size.
You can also use Jesus compression in order to reduce its weight and you can split the file into various
ex email site maps in case your website has a very high number of pages.
In this case I usually organized a site map dash index dot XM L which contains sub site maps even if
other SEO specialists directly create multiple indexes such as site map dash index to dot XM l.
There are several free Wordpress plugins for generating this type of file such as Yost Ezio every CMBS
content management system has a more or less free solution to do it but the important thing is to use
dynamic generations in such a way that with each new content insertion the site map is updated automatically.
Don't forget to send the Excel site back to your google search console account otherwise it will not
be used.
Some experts advise to insert the address in the robot's dot text file but in my opinion doing so ends
up giving important data to the competitors on the structure of your Web site.
So I strongly advise against it.
At this point you are probably wondering do I have to insert all the Web pages in the site map or do
I have to select some of them.
There are some contents that are not important or that should not even be reported to Google.
You should avoid including within a site map any of the following You are wrestles with duplicate content
you are URLs containing parameters you URLs with redirects you URLs blocked by robots dot text or met.
No index you are L's with 4 or 4 or 5 0 3 errors contrary to what some people think it does not mean
that these contents will never be index because Google might discover them from external back links
and may decide to include them in its own index.