Completely disagree with this statement. Almost no site on the planet with under 100 pages really will see any benefit from having a sitemap. In fact, if a site with 5-8 pages needs a sitemap, it means the site structure massively sucks and needs to be fixed.
Okay maybe 5 was a bit low, more like 10-20+ then. After that it can get a bit tricky using menus alone.
But I also disagree with your statement now saying "no site on the planet with under 100 pages really will see any benefit from having a sitemap". Okay, what about a site with 50 pages?
So you don't think that sitemaps have any benefit at all? Even for sites with not that many pages?
Well, as you know there are
two types of sitemaps.
There are
XML sitemaps and then there are
HTML sitemaps.
XML sitemaps let search engines know about your site and all the posts/pages/sub-pages/categories/tags etc so that it can find them better and index them and also lets them know how often you update certain pages etc.
That's why there's
XML plugins for WordPress because it's a format that's supported by the major search engines Google, Bing, Ask etc
If you read what it says on
sitemaps.org
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
What is XML?
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format which is both human-readable and machine-readable. It is defined by the W3C's XML 1.0 Specification and by several other related specifications, all of which are free open standards.
What is XML Sitemap?
A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines
to crawl the site more intelligently.
Where as
HTML sitemaps are meant solely for your websites visitors to more easily navigate a website. It would usually contain bullet pointed anchor text links to all your pages, posts etc so visitors can locate a topic or something they are unable to find via a search or via navigating menus.
So therefore, as we can see from this. Sitemaps both in XML and HTML format are
INCREDIBLY useful, even for smaller sites with less than say 50 pages/categories etc.
