Timeline for Clean up hacked site by getting Google to crawl and index only the URLs in the sitemap
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 4, 2022 at 10:03 | comment | added | Stephen Ostermiller♦ | Lack of an XML sitemap is far from an "instant fail." I only have a sitemap for my largest site with millions of URLs. My twenty smaller sites do great with SEO without sitemaps. Sitemaps are easy enough to implement that they usually get recommended. But their SEO benefits are very limited. They can get Googlebot to come crawl all your URLs, presence of URLs in the sitemap is a canonical signal to Google, and they can give you extra data in Google Search Console. They don't help with indexing or ranking, and they can't limit crawling. | |
| Apr 4, 2022 at 8:51 | comment | added | Cutey from Cute Code | You helped me with my sitemap question @StephenOstermiller. Am I OK to ask more about your above answer in comments in order to expand the answer for other readers? I don't understand why having a sitemap.xml is so vital for search engine submission to the point where it's an instant fail if one is not present but, as you said, they are largely ignored and bots do whatever they want. | |
| Jan 26, 2018 at 17:20 | vote | accept | Shan Xue | ||
| Jan 26, 2018 at 17:07 | history | edited | Stephen Ostermiller♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 251 characters in body
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| Jan 26, 2018 at 17:02 | history | answered | Stephen Ostermiller♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |