You may think you know the answer to this question already, but have you really thought about how a sitemaps affect crawls? Most of us will just submit a sitemap out of habit and because they have been popularized over the years as a valuable SEO tool. There are certain automatic sitemap tools you can obtain that can track the progress of sites that utilize blogging software such as WordPress sites. Because these sites are ever changing and expanding you need an additional program that will track these changes and resubmit more accurate sitemaps.

Well you need not be so concerned, sitemaps really do help with website access and every time a website sitemap is submitted it makes bots that much quicker to visit you. Manual crawling versus sitemap crawling has shown that bots armed with sitemaps are more efficient and responsive than those armed with nothing but an index page.

In fact, site “crawlability" has been shown to have little to no affect on search engine bot response times. SE bots have been found to be slow and delayed when crawling sites that have no sitemap and it takes a considerable amount of time for new pages to be indexed. On the other hand, websites with sitemaps can expect a speedy response and indexing within the hour. This seems to be irrelevant of how easy the urls are to find. Even if your website is optimized to be search engine friendly and easily laid out you can expect large delays in crawling. This leads us to believe that the crawls are only delayed because websites with included sitemaps get priority on crawls. Whether this is the case or not it is clear that sitemaps are essential for building an up to date website index online.

It is actually only beneficial for you to not submit your sitemap if you have not yet evaluated how “crawl friendly" your website is. This will therefore alert you to the problems in your website once you have verified your website to Google and you can evaluate these with the Google WebMaster Tools. Once these problems are fixed it is essential to submit your sitemap as per normal to ensure you get the most out of the search engine bots and get the best up to date indexing in search engines.