Google Webmaster Central is an awesome product and I personally love it. It offers ways for SEOs and Webmasters to learn more about how Google is treating their site. It also offers ways for Webmasters to notify Google of content by submitting a Google Sitemap to them. But some SEOs suggest that you should not submit a Sitemap to Google.
Rand at SEOmoz suggests that we should verify our sites in Google Webmaster Central but do not submit our content via a Google Sitemaps. Why? Well, if Google is excluding your pages in the normal crawl, then there may be a reason for that – says Rand and other SEOs. So losing that data by submitting a Sitemap may put you somewhat in the dark about your site performance in Google.
Does this mean you should not use Sitemaps? Absolutely not! It totally depends on your specific case. I primarily verify my sites in Google but rarely ever submit a Sitemap – however, I have submitted Sitemaps for specific cases.
Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central
Someone could probably label this “black hat” in spirit or execution but nobody should say one shouldn’t be well-versed in the architectonics of systems and processes which exist, so bravo to SEOs. It’s sort like a tax accountant finding loop-holes for citizens to save extra dollars come tax time (but nobody boos the accountants so much, lawyers maybe). I like these tidbits of insightful information and I’m glad the SEO community shares them but I also understand why some (ie. Diggers, others) may view SEOs as somewhat undesirables who “game” otherwise honest and merit-sensitive systems. My thinking is that the SEO community is just more honest and *transparent* about their activities (more mature about it I’d say; confident and upstanding), and unfortunately such brazen visibility makes them a target for every grievance of milking-the-system in general.
I don’t see anything black hat about the practice. Why should you have to submit an XML sitemap to use the Webmaster Central tools?
A well-crawled site won’t benefit from XML sitemaps as much as a new, large content domain that needs to be crawled and indexed quickly. It makes sense to monitor your organic crawling when you’ve achieved significant indexing.
So, are you saying don’t provide sitemaps and ror files on the Web site?
The reason someone could legitimately say it’s “black hat” is the same reason “IP-delivery” is labeled “black hat” — ie. you are serving up two different stories as a deliberate confidence trick in an attempt to intentionally mislead with the goal of financial or other personal gain (ie. increased monetization through better serps, for instance).
It’s an exploit pure and simple, the same way your tax accountant (as I mentioned) will “exploit” the system of tax laws to get you a better tax return, or a lawyer will “exploit” certain legal systems to get you a more favorable court ruling.
The only question that matters therefore is one of public perception. (How much does the public value/like lawyers for instance?) This is the challenge for SEOs; maintaining a “don’t be evil” public illusion while holding the gate keys and being the gatekeepers (a challenge they are obviously meeting with limited success ~ as communities like Digg and MBL are a currently testament to).
The best thing SEOs as a community might explore is a widely adopted “oath” type mechanism (such as a doctor’s “Hippocratic Oath”) to promote (at bare minimum, superficially) an acknowledgement of ethical practice to appease the outside community and downplay the indy-type, rogue, trickster, con-man, swindler image SEOs currently have. I doubt that will happen simply because SEOs are indy-types, rogues, tricksters etc. who don’t “play-by-the-rules” by definition; that’s what SEO is — a modification/amplification of “the normal”, thus the optimizing activity. But now I’m getting way too technical and philosophic and idealistic at the same time and history leads me to believe idealism is not a tool often reached for in the SEO tool bag. SEO is a practical discipline with a very outsider/rebel tradition. Oftentimes that very tradition and impression rubs the less clever and less daring people the wrong way, especially if they been waiting-in-line an awfully long time (when the SEO goes speeding past ;-)
I also love Google Webmaster Central and it helped me sometime. But I don’t have a sitemap and I won’t have it. The site will be crawled by Goggle and thats good.