In this BrightonSEO talk, ex-Google engineer Fili Wiese will be explaining the importance of Sitemaps in technical SEO. He’ll be teaching his audience everything they need to know about sitemaps; from strategy to best practices and measuring success, as well as how to avoid common pitfalls.
Overview
Speaker: Fili Wiese
Job role and company: SEO Expert, Search Brothers
Twitter profile: @filiwiese
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filiwiese/
Website: https://fili.com/
Link to the slides: TBC
What this talk was about
@filiwiese dispels the myths about Sitemaps:
❌Sitemaps do not guarantee for pages to being crawled
❌Sitemaps do not impact rankingsCheck out his great tips from #BrightonSEO session⬇️ pic.twitter.com/AJSzknqabf
— SEMrush (@semrush) April 12, 2019
It’s always fascinating to hear from someone who’s worked for Google – not only does it give you insider access to the world’s largest search engine, but not everyone holds fond memories of their ex. While there was nothing prickly about what Fili Wiese had to say about his past work relationship, he swooned about sitemaps (this writer being a newcomer to the concept), made his talk even more fascinating.
Fili spoke about HTML, XML, Hreflang, RSS, and plain text sitemaps, explaining the value that each can bring to your business. He made it clear that you need to keep your sitemaps up to date, along with advising that you should get the crawl stats from your website – so you can see what Google sees.
While this writer left with plenty of questions about sitemaps, one detail was beyond doubt – sitemaps are important to your business and using them will help to boost your Google rankings.
“Any news article that is more than 2 days old should not be in your sitemap” – @filiwiese, @brightonseo #SEOtips
— TelegraphSEO (@TelegraphSEO) April 12, 2019
Fave quote
“Indexing does not guarantee that a page will be crawled – it’s a suggestion, not an instruction.”
Potential impact on the industry
Sitemaps are something that industry experts have known about for a while, but that doesn’t water down their value. While the impact of this talk might not be that it adds a long list of new information, the outcome should be that it makes sure SEOs don’t forget sitemaps when they’re deciding their onsite strategy.
Key takeaways
- Use sitemaps!
- Keep your sitemaps up to date
- Get the crawl stats from your site
