Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by James Sparks on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/26/2013).

I was just wondering how often you all update or resubmit your sitemap.xml file in WMT?

Hi Everyone,

I was just wondering how often you all update or resubmit your sitemap.xml file in WMT? Although I continually create new content, I always thought that as long as the site architecture was good and google could crawl the site, there was no need to refresh the sitemap. However I was recently told otherwise.
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Dave Elliott: Only if I have done a pretty big overhaul of the site or done a load of 301s or whatever
  • Rand Wilson: I believe that as long as there is good architecture, Google will find your pages..
    HOWEVER
    A sitemap might help to make it faster.
    All of my Drupal and Wordpress sites automatically regenerate the sitemaps, so no need to ever "resubmit" ..
  • James Sparks: Thanks for the feedback. I've never felt the need to resubmit so its nice to get some opinions on it.
  • Arseniy Bolotsko: As +Dave Elliott ; said, only do it after a big overhaul that involves 301's. If your sitemap is generated automatically then you never have to touch it. I can only think of one reason to resubmit and that would be change in name or location of the sitemap.

    I noticed that GWT usually refreshes my sitemaps around midnight.
  • W.E. Jonk: I would re-submit the Sitemaps if I want G to re-crawl the site. For example when you implemented rich snippets or when a section of a site is removed (where the URL's are removed from the Sitemaps and you serve a 301 or 404). In general I would re-submit if I want Googlebot to notice something about the site.

    With regard to new content or new URL's there is no need to re-submit the Sitemaps unless the amount of new URL's is huge. I would use the Fetch as Google and submit to index to indicate to Google that there is a new page that needs to be crawled and indexed. As far as I know that is the fastest way to get indexed.

    https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1352276?hl=en
  • James Sparks: Thanks +W.E. Jonk. I appreciate the advice!
  • W.E. Jonk: Besides the manual thing you can ping: ;Live Q&A September 21, 2011
  • James Sparks: great - I'll definitely check it out. Thanks for the help.
  • S?awomir Zdunek: ... and remember to provide reliable information in the sitemap if you want it to be taken into account by Google.

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 08/26/2013).