New study proves sitemaps are better than no sitemaps.
A recently published study looked at 500 Million URLs that were seen both by sitemaps and using ‘natural discovery’ methods. Of this sample of URLs, the study revealed that 77% of the URLs were first seen by Google on a sitemap!
http://www2009.eprints.org/100/1/p991.pdf
To put this as simple as possible… use sitemaps if you have any interest in being indexed faster.
Another interesting note from this study is how “a search engine” would use a signal-to-noise ratio to determine better quality (more trustable) sitemaps. The ’signal’ is how many pages progress through their search system and are eventually clicked on. The ‘noise’ is how many URLs fall short of that goal and at what point they are eliminated from the process.
The lessons learned here can be achieved by using filters on your domain settings at AutoMapIt. Remove URLs from your sitemap that don’t add content to your site… buy now, view cart, make post, reply to post, sort up/down, calendars with no events that go on forever… and plenty of others similar to these. They are very useful links to have on your site, but when was the last time you saw Google list a ‘view cart’ link? By stripping out these types of URLs from your sitemaps, you will be improving your signal-to-noise ratio and improving the chances that your most important pages are getting indexed quickly.
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