Pascal Birchler, a Developer Programs Engineer at Google and works closely on WordPress related tasks, used this 🤦 facepalming emoji after quoting this on Twitter "a good-looking XML sitemap will bring a better user experience."
Here is that tweet:
„A good-looking XMLsitemap will bring a better user experience.“ 🤦♂️ https://t.co/6d9yuepDWG
— Pascal Birchler (@swissspidy) August 14, 2020
XML sitemaps are not something users look at and obviously do not have any impact on user experience.
Gary Illyes from Google chimed in as well:
I will also say No. That whole thread is a trainwreck imo
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) August 15, 2020
And so did John Mueller of Google:
As someone who has spent way too much time crafting XSL files for sitemaps ( https://t.co/XqhCR9VEvk says 15 years ago o_O), if your users have to look at your sitemap file, your website is terrible.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 15, 2020
So no, XML Sitemaps are for machines, not humans. So they give machines a good experience, but not users a good user experience.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
