Why it's bad to have two sitemap
Having two sitemaps for a website can be considered a bad practice for SEO for several reasons, and understanding this requires a dive into the fundamentals of what sitemaps are, their purpose, and how search engines like Google use them. In the realm of web development, SEO plays a crucial role in making a website visible and accessible to search engines, which in turn helps in attracting more visitors. A sitemap is fundamentally a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl, and index its content. It’s a vital tool for SEO because it directly communicates with search engines, indicating which pages are important and how often they are updated.
Redundancy and Confusion
Having two sitemaps doesn't necessarily provide any additional value if they both serve the same purpose. Instead, it introduces redundancy and potential confusion for search engines. Search engines are designed to follow clear and concise directives. Presenting them with two sitemaps, especially if they contain overlapping information, can lead to uncertainty about which pages are prioritized or even cause important pages to be overlooked if there is inconsistency between the sitemaps.
Resource Wastage
Search engines allocate a crawl budget for each website, which is the number of pages the search engine will crawl on your site within a certain timeframe. If you have two sitemaps, especially if there is significant overlap between them, you risk wasting your crawl budget on duplicate content. This is particularly problematic for large websites, where efficiently using the crawl budget is crucial for ensuring all content is indexed.
Increased Complexity and Maintenance
From a web development perspective, maintaining one sitemap is straightforward, but managing two sitemaps increases complexity and the potential for errors. Each time content is added, removed, or updated, both sitemaps need to be revised and tested. This not only doubles the maintenance work but also increases the risk of discrepancies between the sitemaps, which can hinder SEO efforts.
Dilution of SEO Efforts
Effective SEO requires focusing your efforts on optimizing the most important aspects of your site. By splitting focus between two sitemaps, you may dilute your SEO efforts, making it harder to achieve optimal results. For example, if one sitemap is optimized for certain keywords or user intents while the other is not, this mixed signal can affect your site's overall SEO performance.
Best Practices for Sitemap Usage
The best practice is to have a single, comprehensive sitemap that accurately reflects the structure and content of your site. If your site is large and complex, instead of having separate sitemaps for the same type of content, consider using a sitemap index file. A sitemap index file is a sitemap that points to other sitemaps, effectively organizing them in a way that is easy for search engines to process. This approach is especially useful for e-commerce sites, news portals, and other dynamic sites that frequently update their content.
Moreover, focus on ensuring that your sitemap is:
- Up-to-date: Regularly update your sitemap as new content is added or removed from your site.
- Clean: Exclude duplicate pages, pages with no SEO value (like privacy policies), and broken links to avoid wasting crawl budget.
- Correctly formatted: Follow XML sitemap protocol standards to ensure your sitemap is readable by search engines.
Conclusion
In web development and SEO, clarity, efficiency, and accuracy are paramount. Having two sitemaps for a website can work against these principles by introducing redundancy, wasting resources, complicating site maintenance, and potentially diluting SEO efforts. Adopting a strategic approach to sitemap management, favoring a single, well-structured sitemap or a sitemap index file for larger sites, is key to enhancing your website's visibility and performance in search engine results. By focusing on a streamlined, effective SEO strategy, developers and content creators can ensure their websites are not only discovered but also favorably indexed by search engines, driving more traffic and engagement with their content.