Sitemaps are good for you!
With all of the hullabaloo over Googles latest update, one thing has become apparent to many webmasters… Don’t put all of your chickens in one egg. Or something like that..
People have spent a lot of time and effort strictly to please Google. Although they do account for roughly 80% of search traffic, the remaining 20% of everyone else that is online is still a huge number. MSN has it’s own quirks that it likes to see and the Google camps often overlook them. Yahoo has their very own sitemap format that you can create and send to them, but few SEO folk use it. OPML is a much less-used format, but having one on hand could never hurt.
Many people have stale old sitemaps that haven’t changed since the site was originally built. Keeping the HTML sitemap current is essential to opening the doors of your website to all spiders. One of the warnings I have is that too many links on a page is generally not considered a good thing to do. If your sitemap goes beyond 100-200 links, you should consider using multiple pages for your sitemap.
So join the latest craze to beef up your sitemaps and get back to one of the basics of SEO. This is one strategy that really can’t hurt you, and often times helps you more than you know. If you’re like me and would rather work on your website than on your sitemaps, use a service like AutoMapIt to keep your sitemaps in all formats up to date for free.
Tags: A variety of sitemap formats can help your seo efforts to succeed.