No more sitemaps? You don’t say . . .

For those of us with websites, the competing search engines at SES (Search Engine Strategies) made the following announcement yesterday:

“Today, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! together are announcing support of “autodiscovery” of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.”

Find the full report at Ask.com’s official blog.

As far as I’m concerned the jury is still out as to whether sitemaps are worth the effort made by web owners. Personally I’ve found I have more pages indexed without a sitemap – autodiscovery or manually submitted. With my 60 page site I can count on having all my pages indexed unless I have a sitemap. With a sitemap my total pages indexed usually drops to 20 or so. And I’m not alone.

Many website owners I’ve talked to find they have the same results. To be fair, there are those who believe sitemaps are just wonderful. (The cat's meow.) My opinion is you need to test for yourself. Try your site with and without sitemaps and see which works best for you.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
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