Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
Michael Martinez: No. The HTML sitemap consists of 1 or more pages on your site that visitors use to see how much content you have published.
Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: But as far as i understand crawlers do use them to crawl. No?
Michael Martinez: Nathan Nikolay Gaidy Sometimes. It`s generally helpful but not required and there are no guarantees it will make up for a lack of internal linking throughout the rest of your site.
Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Michael Martinez I just saw a video by google webmasters on youtube saying it is beneficial to have both so I was wondering if I need to submit it via webmaster tools or it just needs to be there to be picked up by the crawler. Also I thought maybe instead of submitting I just add the html sitemap on my xml file or it is not how I should do it?
Michael Martinez: Nathan Nikolay Gaidy They are asking people not to submit URLs unless something needs to be updated quickly.
If you link to the HTML sitemap from your sitewide navigation it should be fine.
SEO isn`t really about getting stuff indexed instantly. It`s about how a site manages its relationship with a search engine. It`s okay if an important page isn`t indexed for a few days.
Don`t rely on an XML sitemap to get a specific page crawled and indexed. You want the sitemap files or pages to be secondary crawl conduits for your site, not the primary sources of crawl.
Sam Mah: The HTML site map is built for human users, whereas the XML sitemap is for search engines.
Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Michael Martinez The problem is I am fixing a very bad website now for a client... he had no idea he has a bunch of loose ends of demo and test pages that are being indexed while main pages are not being indexed due to bad coding...
Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Sam Mah So it is impossible to submit an html sitemap to google?
Michael Martinez: Nathan Nikolay Gaidy Given this additional information I would say that if I were in your shoes I would:
1) Add the HTML sitemap to sitewide navigation
2) Add the HTML sitemap URL to the XML sitemap
3) Submit the HTML sitemap URL to Google Search Console
As a rule of thumb, if I`m just adding a page to a site that is doing well I don`t go to any extra lengths to get it indexed. But if you`re fixing a site then expediting crawl is usually a good thing.
But I would do this last.
Sam Mah: Nathan Nikolay Gaidy I believe that link is already added to your XML map when you generated it. It`s there—no need to submit it again.
Stockbridge Truslow: Sitemap or not... if Google can`t discover a page without needing to find it on your sitemap, it`s not going to rank for anything anyway.
Stockbridge Truslow: Sitemaps are useful as a tool to help you keep track of what should be indexed vs. what is actually indexed. Google search console will even send you warning if it sees a page on your sitemap that it can`t find by other means.
As something that you "need" to have and as something to help your search rankings, though - they are completely useless. In order for a page to be ranked, it needs to have some links to it - both from other pages on your site as well as other pages on the web. If Google can`t find it this way - and the only link it can find to a page is in your sitemap, then it really doesn`t matter if Google indexes the page or not - it`s not going to rank for anything.
Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Stockbridge Truslow Sitemap with linking is useless but an HTML sitemap is an actual link, right?
Stockbridge Truslow: No. Well - it`s an "actual" link, but there`s no context. There`s none of the other things Google does to value a link. And, even if you could come up with some argument that says that there is some value - divided out by having every link on your site on the page, there`s no PR or "link juice" available to pass through any one of those links, anyway.
Nathan Nikolay Gaidy: Stockbridge Truslow Basically the sitemap page is so unpopular that it has no value.
Stockbridge Truslow: It has too many links on it for one. And for two - there`s no context to it - so the links don`t have any signal to send. And... well, it`s a sitemap. It`s job is to link to everything - so all it gets for doing it`s job is a star on its forehead. But it has no actual value for ranking.
I hardly ever submit sitemaps for anything I work on.
Do I need to submit an html sitemap to google just as I do xml maps? 
