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Why Use Sitemaps?

It is very important to use Sitemaps in your WordPress Blog, because they help your blog visitors get directly to the information they need. Sitemaps also help web spiders find your blog’s links easily. The following points discuss some of the reasons for using Sitemaps in your Blog.

Crawl augmentation

Although web spiders are continuously improving, they are far from perfect. Search engines have no problems admitting this. Here is what Google says about crawl aug mentation:
Submitting a Sitemap helps you make sure Google knows about the URLs on your site. It can be especially helpful if your content is not easily discoverable by our crawler (such as pages accessible only through a form). It is not, however, a guarantee that those URLs will be crawled or indexed. We use information from Sitemaps to augment our usual
crawl and discovery processes.

Poor linking site structure

Not all sites are created equal. Sites with poor linking structures tend to index poorly. Orphan pages, deep links, and search engine traps are culprits of poor site indexing. The use of Sitemaps can alleviate these situations, at least temporarily, to give you enough time to fix the root of the problem.

Crawling frequency

One of the biggest benefits of using Sitemaps is in timely crawls or recrawls of your site (or just specific pages). XML Sitemap documents let you tell crawlers how often they should read each page. Sites using Sitemaps tend to be crawled faster on Yahoo! and Google. It takes Google and Yahoo! minutes to respond to Sitemap submissions or resubmissions. This can be very helpful for news sites, e-commerce sites, blogs, and any other sites that are constantly updating or adding new content.

Content ownership

Many malicious web scraper sites are lurking around the Internet. Having search engines index your content as soon as it is posted can be an important way to ensure that search engines are aware of the original content owner. In this way, a copycat site does not get the credit for your content. Granted, it is still possible for search engines to confuse the origins of a content source.

Sitemap plugin for WordPress

If you want to add a Sitemap to your WordPress Blog, make sure to install and activate this WordPress plugin that generates an XML Sitemap.