Once a very popular feature on almost every site on the internet, the sitemap served many different functions. For starters, it was a great way to help first-time visitors to a site find what they were looking for; in some cases, simple categories weren’t enough to adequately break down the relationship of every page to one another. In addition to this, primitive search engine technology made it more difficult for crawlers to find all of the content on your website. With a site map available, both of these issues became relative non-issues. These days, however, larger websites still face structural problems in this regard and do require a site map in order to be more effective. Why do you need a sitemap for your large website? Continue reading and we will explain the rationale behind such a need.

Reduced Indexing Times

Larger websites tend to rank better in search engine results, which may leave you wondering why indexing would be an issue. The biggest threat that a large site or blog may face is scraping; if an opportunistic thief wants to grab some content for their own projects, then they may stalk your website in the hopes of catching new content as soon as it is published. Once available, they may be able to yank the content, publish it to their own domains and have it indexed before crawlers find it on your website. A sitemap installed will make the indexing process more efficient and help search engines quickly track down any new content added by you or your writers.

Increased User Friendliness

Sitemaps are a still a great way to make it easier for readers to find the content they wish to see, so there’s absolutely no reason not to include them on larger websites. You may already be familiar with pseudo-sitemaps, such as the blog archive section that many WordPress websites offer. This can make it easy to sort content by category or in chronological order, both of which may be preferred depending on the nature of your blog or site. As you want to be pinging for SEO, you also want to ensure that readers do not prematurely leave your site because they couldn’t find the content they sought.

No Missed Content

Search engine crawlers still lack sophistication when it comes to identifying every single element of your site – you can even “hide” elements from them by using select codes. A sitemap can ensure that these entities are able to find each and every bit of content you have published, rather than only being able to track down the pieces that are either very popular or have lots of links coming and going from them. Because you write content with the aim of it being discovered and read, there is no reason why you wouldn’t include a sitemap to ensure that each piece of it is indexed.

Conclusion

You need a sitemap for three main reasons: to increase ease of use, to ensure all content is indexed and to ensure that all of that content is indexed in a rapid fashion. The ignoring of any of these may result in your pinging for SEO strategies being hampered, original content being stolen or users leaving your site without finding what they need. Since it is not difficult to construct a sitemap – even for large sites – we highly recommend that you do so today.