Google

Some SEOs Suggest To Verify But Not Submit A Google Sitemap

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.

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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.