The sitemap is the solution to guide Google’s bot so that it crawls the strategic URLs of your site . Remember, without crawling, the search engine will not index your URLs and you will have no chance of positioning yourself in the search results. Goodbye to the first positions 
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Why are sitemaps important in your SEO strategy?
To begin with, sitemaps are an important topic to address, especially if your site has several thousand pages. In this case, we generally find e-commerce sites, online press but also the advertising sector where page volumes can be very high and/or the lifespan of content is volatile. In this context, sitemaps are important for two reasons:
- Maximize the indexing of your strategic URLs . The sitemap file will indicate to the bot the URLs that you consider to be priorities so that it can crawl them and add them to its index. If you work for sites that have several hundred new pages per day, this allows you to quickly submit new content. This file should be seen as a “guide” to make the work of Google robots as easy as possible. Also note that Google ignores the <priority> and <changefreq> values but now uses the <lastmod> value if it is consistent and verifiable. This last point is very important and we invite you to take a close look at it . Be careful, it is always good to remember, Google does not guarantee that URLs in sitemaps will be automatically indexed.
- Monitor the health of your site. We like to criticize Google rightly or wrongly, but it is clear that through Google Search Console, we have a powerful tool at our disposal to monitor a site. On the sitemap side, the GSC allows you to access a multitude of very valuable information. Has the page been indexed, if it is not, why? This is probably the most important information for you. Technical error (4xx / 5xx / 3xx), noindex page, canonicalized page, low quality content… The reasons are diverse and give you information to correct the problems. Google Search Console finally allows you to have a view on the health of your URLs . This is the other great advantage of having sitemaps on your site.
Sitemaps are the tool you need to rely on to optimize your indexing strategies. It is in your best interest for your sitemaps to be “clean”, that is to say, they contain a minimum of errors. 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 is an essential tool to make the crawler’s task as easy as possible so that it indexes as many pages as possible .
Why is it complicated to create a sitemap?
In an ideal world, you would have a technical solution to easily generate sitemaps that meet Google’s requirements. However, the reality is sometimes more complex.
- Lack of flexibility of your CMS. If you have a CMS, it may be able to generate your sitemaps efficiently, and in this case, you are lucky. But in many cases, it can be complex to create sitemaps to meet custom strategies. For example, will your CMS be able to generate a sitemap with your SEO landing pages created with a third-party tool? Is it able to correctly fill in the <lastmod> tag? Can it generate sitemaps with URLs from faceted pages?
- Lack of technical resources. This is the first pitfall that comes up among SEO consultants and agencies, the lack of technical resources to develop or evolve THE script for generating your sitemaps. A script that allows for example to delete URLs that are no longer up to date, URLs that have a nofollow attribute or even URLs that are canonicalized. And we’re not even mentioning URLs that do 301 redirects. Oh yes and without forgetting to follow Google’s announcements to update this script to correctly process the <lastmod> field for example.
Yes, in 2024, we still find sites that simply do not have a sitemap or sitemaps that report more than 50% errors. In other words, a disaster!
Rest assured, we have developed the Sitemap application on EdgeSEO
At Fasterize, our goal with EdgeSEO is to offer you a range of applications to manage your SEO on a daily basis independently . It is therefore quite natural that we have developed an application on this very important subject, which are sitemaps. You can now independently create your sitemaps and modify them in a few minutes. To generate the XML content of your sitemap, you can rely on market solutions or use your crawl solution. You can even retrieve the logs directly via our API. Then, it will be child’s play to publish a sitemap on your site with the Sitemap application. All you have to do is name your sitemap, copy and paste the XML code and validate it. In return, you will have a nice URL to submit in the Search Console or directly in your robots.txt file.
