The sitemap is the solution for directing Google's bot to crawl your site's strategic URLs. Remember, without a crawl, the search engine won't index your URLs and you won't stand a chance of ranking in the search results. Goodbye first positions 🥲.

Why are sitemaps important to your SEO strategy?

To begin with, sitemaps are an important subject to deal with, especially if your site has several thousand pages. In this case, we generally find e-commerce sites, the online press, but also the advertising sector, where page volumes can be very high and/or content lifespans are volatile. Sitemaps are important in this context for two reasons:

1. Optimiser au maximum l’indexation de vos URLs stratégiques. Le fichier sitemap va indiquer au bot les URLs que vous considérez comme prioritaires afin que celui-ci puisse les crawler et les ajouter dans son index. Si vous travaillez pour des sites qui ont plusieurs centaines de nouvelles pages par jour, ça permet de soumettre rapidement le nouveau contenu. Il faut voir ce fichier comme un « guide » pour faciliter au maximum le travail des robots de Google. Sachez également que Google ignore les valeurs <priority> et <changefreq> mais utilise désormais la valeur <lastmod> si elle est cohérente et vérifiable. Ce dernier point est très important et on vous invite à vous y intéresser de près. Attention, c’est toujours bon de le rappeler, Google ne garantit pas que les URLs dans les sitemaps seront automatiquement indexées.
2. Monitor the health of your site. We like to criticize Google, rightly or wrongly, but we have to admit that Google Search Console is a powerful tool for monitoring a site. On the sitemap side, GSC provides access to a wealth of valuable information. Has the page been indexed, and if not, why not? This is probably the most important information for you. Technical error (4xx / 5xx / 3xx), noindexed page, canonicalized page, low-quality content... There are many reasons for this, all of which provide you with the information you need to correct the problem. Google Search Console finally gives you an overview of the health of your URLs. This is the other great advantage of having sitemaps on your site.

Sitemaps are the tools you need to optimize your indexing strategies. It's in your interest to ensure that your sitemaps are "clean", i.e. that they contain as few errors as possible. As you know, Google allocates a "crawl budget" to your site. If 30% of the URLs in your sitemap contain errors, that's as much time as it won't spend discovering your strategic pages. In short, it's an essential tool to make it as easy as possible for the crawler to index as many pages as possible.

Why is it complicated to create a sitemap?

In an ideal world, you'd have a technical solution for easily generating sitemaps that meet Google's requirements. However, the reality is sometimes more complex.

1. Manque de flexibilité de vos CMS. Si vous avez un CMS, il est peut-être capable de générer vos sitemaps de manière efficace, et dans ce cas, vous êtes chanceux. Mais dans de nombreux cas, il peut s’avérer complexe de créer des sitemaps pour répondre à des stratégies custom. Par exemple, votre CMS sera-t-il en mesure de générer un sitemap avec vos landing pages SEO créées avec un outil tiers ? Est-il en mesure de renseigner correctement la balise <lastmod> ? Peut-il générer des sitemaps avec des URLs issues des pages à facettes ?
2. Manque de ressources techniques. C’est le premier écueil qui remonte chez les consultants et agences SEO, le manque de ressources techniques pour développer ou faire évoluer LE script de génération de vos sitemaps. Un script qui permet par exemple de supprimer les URLs qui ne sont plus d’actualité, des URLs qui ont un attribut nofollow ou encore des URLs qui sont canonisées. Et on ne mentionne même pas les URLs qui font des redirections 301. Ah oui et sans oublier de suivre les annonces de Google pour mettre à jour ce script pour traiter correctement le champ <lastmod> par exemple.

Yes, in 2024, there are still sites that simply don't have a sitemap, or sitemaps that return more than 50% errors. In other words, a catastrophe!

Rest assured, we've developed the Sitemap application on EdgeSEO

At Fasterize, our aim with EdgeSEO is to offer you a range of applications to manage your day-to-day SEO independently. So it's only natural that we've developed an application on the all-important subject of sitemaps. You can now create your own sitemaps and modify them in just a few minutes. For the generation of the XML content of your sitemap, you can rely on solutions available on the market or use your own crawling solution. You can even retrieve the logs directly via our API. Then it's child's play to publish a sitemap on your site using the Sitemap application. All you have to do is name your sitemap, copy and paste the XML code and validate it. In return, you'll have a beautiful URL to submit to Search Console or directly to your robots.txt file.

See full documentation

Beyond the classic use of a sitemap, here are a few ideas you can deploy with this Sitemap application:

1. Sitemap with your redirects. Use a sitemap to speed up the indexing of new pages after a redirect. This is useful for speeding up the indexing of new URLs after the deployment of a redirection plan following a migration.
2. Sitemap with your 410s. Create a sitemap to list URLs with HTTP 410 status to {force|accelerate} their removal from the index.
3. Sitemap with your orphan pages. Create a sitemap dedicated to orphan pages (pages without internal links) to ensure they are detected and crawled by search engines.
4. etc.

This is the first step in the creation of applications based around sitemaps. We're soon preparing a great feature that will allow you to "clean" your existing sitemaps according to several criteria: 4xx / 5xx error, 301 redirect, noindexed or canonicalized page. You'll be able to clean up your sitemap to give Google only indexable URLs. A must-have when you know how important it is to preserve your crawl budget for important pages on your site.

And if you have any ideas or requirements concerning sitemaps, don't hesitate to contact us directly to discuss them. We look forward to hearing from you. Finally, if you'd like a demo of our EdgeSEO solution, we'd be delighted to show you how EdgeSEO can help you deploy your recommendations on a daily basis.

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