View Full Version : Site maps and search engines?
In the old days we all heard (and likely told clients) that a site map is necessary/helpful to make sure search engines properly index a site.
To be honest, I've never quite understood this. As long as you have normal HTML (not javascript) links to your sections/pages from your home page and on all your other pages (and any good nav design would!), I see no benefit, from an SEO perspective (ignoring any other design/usability reasons), of including a site map in a site.
Thoughts for or against this reasoning?
seomike
01-19-2005, 04:14 PM
Deep directories will have a hard time being indexed without a sitemap or some kick A PR pushing them up there.
index >> directory 1 >> directory 2 >> directory 3 >> directory 4 >> directory 5
vs.
index >> site map >> directory 5
That being said I don't see any need for a site structure that goes 5 directories deep unless you are a dmoz or a yahoo. Most 1st time mod rewriters will make the mistake of using / to break up keywords as they stuff them in their urls. and then they find out later that they can't get deep crawled and wonder what the problem is. :D
Yeah, my question is basically in regards to a "normal" marketing/brochure site. No deeper than 3 layers or so.
Home -> Products section -> Product Detail -> More detail no one ever reads. ;)
brockgs
01-19-2005, 04:37 PM
That being said I don't see any need for a site structure that goes 5 directories deep unless you are a dmoz or a yahoo. Most 1st time mod rewriters will make the mistake of using / to break up keywords as they stuff them in their urls. and then they find out later that they can't get deep crawled and wonder what the problem is. :D
If however your top level pages link to secondary and tertiery level pages using URLs with relevant keywords separated by /'s it will still get crawled just fine even though the URL maybe long and appear to be going deeeeeeep. I use mod-rewrite quite a bit and some URLs are fairly long but the entire site is at most 4 levels deep and we have quite good results with Google. :-)