How Important is a Sitemap File, Really?
Published on May 27, 2017
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
An interesting thing happened with my search results this week. They tanked. I dropped nearly 90%. As I attempted to figure out what I could possibly have done to make my site disappear from the search results, I realized that Google was returning a 'file too big' error on my sitemap file.
I had All In One SEO compressing that file (it was less than 1k). Turns out, that the compression was actually causing Google and Bing to return that error code. I turned off the compression, resubmitted the sitemap file, and a couple of days later my search results were back to normal.
Despite Google and Bing assuring us that a sitemap file is not necessary to index your site, it appears to have more of an effect than they are admitting. Anyone else experience something similar?
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