A guide to manage Sitemaps with Google Search Console

SEO admin 16 March 2020 Reading time : 3 minutes

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In the building of a positive dialogue between our site and Googlebot sitemaps play an important role, we know that by now; in order to limit errors – which can cost us a lot in terms of page indexing and site performance – we can use the tools of the Google Search Console, and in particular the Sitemap Report. That’s what the new episode of the Google Search Console Training webseries is about.

A guide for sitemaps

Our guide is – as always – Daniel Waisberg, who starts to describe what a sitemap is by highlighting the main aspects of this file: in short, “it is a signal of which URLs of your site you want Google to scan” and can provide information about newly created or modified URLs.

Google also supports four further expanded syntax modes by which we can provide additional information, useful to describe files and contents that are difficult to analyze in order to improve their indexing: so we can describe a URL with included images or a video, indicate the presence of alternative languages or geolocalized versions with hreflang annotations, or (for news sites) to use a particular variant that allows you to indicate the latest updates.

Google and Sitemap

“If I don’t have a Sitemap, can Google still find all the pages on my site?”. The Search advocate also answers this frequent question, explaining that a sitemap may not be necessary if we have a relatively small site and an appropriate internal linking between pages, given the fact that Googlebot should be able to discover contents without any problems.

On the contrary, in certain cases a sitemap is useful and necessary to help Google decide what and when to scan your site: