SEO News You Can Use: Sitemap Size Doesn’t Really Matter For Google

A sitemap is an important part of your website because search engines, such as Google, read the file to more intelligently crawl your site. The sitemap tells the crawler which files you believe are important.

But does size matter?

Google webmaster John Mueller recently said there isn’t an ideal size for a sitemap for optimizing a website’s crawl speed. He said in a Reddit thread that the size of a sitemap and the number of sitemap files generally won’t affect crawling.

Muller also said he recommends separating sitemap into sections that will align with your emphasis areas, specifically using category pages vs. detail pages as an example. Separating the sections will help you monitor each section individually in Google Search Console. Mueller added that using multiple sitemaps won’t impact crawling or indexing a website.

More SEO News You Can Use

Google Site Kit WordPress Plugin Now Available for All: On Thursday, Google announced the full release of its new Google Site Kite WordPress plugin. You can configure key Google services, get insights on how people find and use your site and learn how to improve and monetize your content. It had been in beta testing — released in June 2019 as a developer preview — but after the feedback and improvements it’s not ready for everyone to install and use.

Are Your Competitors Creating Fake Review Sites?: A recent WebmasterWorld discussion shed light on a potential Google issue in which competitors of businesses are creating fake review sites to rank in Google. These review sites promote one company’s products and then trash their competitors with negative reviews to funnel all leads into their company. Here’s more from Search Engine Journal.

Google to Stop Indexing and Ranking Flash Content: Google recently announced that the search engine will stop indexing and ranking Flash content. So, it won’t process content within Flash SWF files. Flash was introduced in 1996 by Adobe to produce richer content. But fewer browsers support Flash these days.

Google Has No ‘Ideal’ Page Speed for Your Website: In a recent special edition of the Google Webmasters video series, Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt answered questions about optimal site speed. They said when Google measures page speed for the purpose of ranking content it generally separates pages into two categories: really good or pretty bad. So, there is no “ideal” page speed for your website. You just need to make sure it loads fast enough for a good user experience so it falls into the “really good” category for the Google algorithm.

Why You Might Not Have Noticed Much Change After the Google BERT Update: Well, did the big Google BERT algorithm update affect your website rankings? Too early to tell yet? Google introduced the BERT update — designed to better understand natural language search queries — last week. The search engine said it would affect 1 in 10 queries. But many SEOs haven’t noticed much of a change yet. Search Engine Land looks at why you may not have noticed the Google BERT update.

Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.