Finally, another problem occurs with sites where Google’s crawl does not reach all the pages (with crawl budget problems ). We find that it has trouble reaching very deep URLs and we decide to upload them to the sitemaps “to help it find them.”
In these cases we can cause
The spider to attack pages that have less positioning priority than you gave them in your structure. For example, in a web structure you have relegat the positioning of very old articles that were not well focus on the real target of your website to several clicks from the home page (assuming that many will not be index).
You upload a sitemap and you are happy
Because the indexing of these articles improves. But, on the other hand, you do not realize that the crawl budget is still the same as you had (you have not improv it) and that the spider visits these deprioritiz contents ends up causing, after a while, the deindexing of others that were not in the first line of indexing but that you had more priority office 365 database than these that you are now starting to collect.
When it happens you may
not realize that you caus the problem yourself, hoping to improve indexing. it is and the sitemap.xml does not improve it.
Finally, a problem (which I consider minor) is that we are making all our URLs and all the data we put on them available to anyone who can luckily these are not many find this file. SEO competitors are also audit and making it a little difficult for them is not a bad idea.
It seems to me that, it is not
A problem for the competition to see our sitemaps, but it all depends. If this worries you, it is easy to avoid: give the files a name that is not obvious and declare them in Google Search Console and not in Robots.txt.
In short, two things to highlight:
On many websites you won’t notice any of these problems by adding a sitemap and
If you don’t take it seriously, you may be doing yeezys shoes worse than better at indexing. As a general rule, if there is no clear strategy behind it, don’t create a sitemap.
Declare war on “sitemap” files, they are not the good guys.