It is actually very obvious that they do not help, but it keeps happening. People read sitemaps and make strange associations. An XML Sitemap file is not the same as a Sitemap mount on one or more pages of the website.
It is a very specific file that your users do
Not see and that you only offer to crawlers. It only serves SEO purposes and does not affect the usability of the site.
A Sitemap (or HTML sitemap or sitemap for short) :
These are web pages that were us many years ago to fill in the gaps in the structure of the web. What these pages did was offer a secondary indexing route for sites that did not allow spiders to reach the content by jumping from link to link. In other skype database words, basic gaps in the site were solv by creating new pages on it.
This was very common a few years ago
We had menus that were set up in iframes or with flash. Websites were made by designers, without guidelines, and UX didn’t even have a name…
Later on, they were us for specific cases
For example, they were very common on websites bas on search engines (classifis, flight pages, etc.). The page as it was design did not offer links sitemaps are the only way to to the content, so a link was plac below the “site map” where link by link the content end up being access by the spiders. Those were different times and spiders were much dumber and we knew less about how to manage them.
Today, sitemaps are pointless
There are much better methods to get spiders to find content. First, a well-plann architecture and taking advantage of the site’s own menus and link blocks is necessary. If this is not enough, we will probably ne to provide secondary access yeezys shoes routes (airlines still do this) but with a structure very close to a real site and with content, not just pages full of links.