• Small Business SEM, Tuesday, June 24, 2008 2:45 PM

Matt McGee thinks so. In fact, he thinks they're the most overrated SEO tactic out there. And in light of a slew of recent discussions extolling the virtues of XML sitemaps, McGee lists the reasons that he thinks the navigation guides get too much attention.

First, McGee says that they don't solve any real indexing or crawlability problems--sitemaps just mask them. "If you have a 100-page site, and the spiders can only access 25 of your pages, fix your crawlability problems," he says. "Using a sitemap to solve crawlability issues is never a good idea. It's like putting a band-aid on your chest after open-heart surgery."

And if the engines are crawling your entire site, but only indexing a few pages, then working on things like the content and links on those un-indexed pages is what you should be doing--not worrying about a sitemap, McGee says.

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