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What Google Sitemaps Can and Can't Do
October 12, 2006
On the heels of my complaint that Google is sending mixed messages about how it interprets the "nofollow" link attribute, I need to give credit where it's due. Earlier in the week, Matt Cutts asked his readers to report genuine SERP bugs. Not the type of "bug" characterized by your competitor's site ranking higher than yours, but results that return truly crazy results.
The post itself was fairly unremarkable because its purpose was merely to narrow his definition of "buggy." But in the comments section, when asked by a reader why the reader's site showed only two pages indexed at Google "when the site has several more pages that are search engine friendly and a Google Sitemap," Cutts dropped a nugget of gold:
The fact is that if you want Google to crawl you deeply (more than the 1-2 urls), you do need to have some links. Submitting a sitemap to Google lets us know those urls exist, but sitemaps are also not a back door; if no one at all in the whole web links to your domain at all, Google won’t crawl you as deeply.
Sounds like a great excuse to plug a link building service, but that would be crass. Instead, I'll just mention that a Google Sitemap is great for truncating the crawling time required for a site, but it's not a shortcut to ranking well, and as this quote states, it's not even a shortcut to getting indexed.
Per his request, I did leave a comment about the [therapy products] query that Sean caught in June. He said he'd pass it along.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at October 12, 2006 11:25 PM
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