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Bing's Fabrice Canal said on Twitter "Sitemaps are a daily, and ideally real time, snapshots of all relevant pages of your sites." "Sitemaps must include these main ranking pages," he added. This was in response to Dawn Anderson posting something a development team told her.
Dawn wrote "Hey folks in the SEO space. I've just been advised by a dev team that they don't include the main categories of the site (which are main ranking targets) in the XML sitemap because they're not important enough pages? I dispute that vehemently. What say you?"
So yea, Fabrice has been involved in Bing Search since it was like MSN Search - since Microsoft first started working on its search engine. He knows a thing or two.
I agree with you Dawn. That's non sense... Sitemaps are a daily (ideally real time) snapshot of all relevant pages of your sites. Sitemaps must include these main ranking pages.
— Fabrice Canel (@facan) August 26, 2020
But if you want to have more fun and see the SEO community reaction to Dawn's tweet, check it out on Twitter. I'll embed some random ones:
The reason is BS.
— Victor Pan 🇹🇼🇺🇲 (@victorpan) August 26, 2020
While the actual ranking impact on those pages not being in the XML sitemap likely minimal, assuming there are links from the homepage to those main category pages...
But yeah tell me what's more important once I show you the $$$$
My immediate reaction pic.twitter.com/SVRUaeg1WB
— Gianluca Fiorelli wears a 😷. Be like Gianluca (@gfiorelli1) August 26, 2020
But my perfectionism can't handle that. It's like when you do not remove redirected pages from the sitemap. Google will probably still figure it out - but it's still just... wrong.
— Esben Rasmussen (@EsbenRasmussen) August 26, 2020
Which begs the question: WHY?? Excluding a certain subset seems like a lot of effort for... what? pic.twitter.com/XJbSrCe8bY
My response: What other "SEO" decisions have you made over the last 24-36 months? Let's work together and unclog some pipes with a forensic audit of those changes and find 30-1000%+ traffic improvements. pic.twitter.com/XiNABWUI8G
— Jeff (@jeffrey_coyle) August 26, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
