Sitemap Importance

In the analysis of the use of the URL Inspection tool that is provided with Google Search Console, the fact that the Sitemap is checked when a check is made to whether a page has been or can be indexed, raises the question of how important is the presence of a sitemap?

I seem to be able to get Googlebot to index my pages after I make a specific request that it does so. Going forward I may need to add the URLs to my textual format sitemap so that when a "normal" crawl is made of the site the bot will have a document to work from.

The URL Inspection tool does tell me that there is often "No referring sitemaps detected" included in the indexing report.

Adding URLs to the sitemap

This will take some time to do manually. It may be a case where an automatic process may be of use.

However, due to the nature of my development process and the fact that I am a relatively unimportant website, in that Google and other major search engines would not regularly spider my pages, an XML sitemap may be of secondary importance.

The ability of an XML format to specify re-crawl times and expiration does not really apply to me.

I notice that there is a raft of Wordpress plugins for this. Again, this confirms my thoughts regarding the use of Wordpress. Those that use it for business may well have the budget for such tools. This does not mean that they are in any way effective.