Evan Carmichael explains why XML sitemaps matter for SEO and walks through GSiteCrawler, a free Windows tool that crawls your site, generates a standards-compliant sitemap, and flags broken links and missing images. Run it monthly, upload the sitemap to Search Console, and fix the errors it finds.
Questions this video answers
Yes. A sitemap tells search engines about every page on your site, ensuring deep‑linked content gets indexed and can rank.
Use the free desktop tool GSiteCrawler: enter your site URL, let it crawl, and it will generate an XML sitemap you can upload and submit via Google Search Console.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer questions from one of my readers, Stan, and also share one of the tools that I use to run a business that I really like, so it's a two-for-one deal here today. So Stan's question is about sitemaps. So he was saying, that a third party recently told him that his website rankings could be hurt if he doesn't have a sitemap, and he says he couldn't find a sitemap on EvanCarmichael.com and if I can give him some advice. So Stan, sitemaps are really important. The reason why they're important is to show the search engines all of the pages that exist on your site. So what Google will do as an example is they'll come to your homepage and then start digging into your site by crawling the links. So the more you link to your deeper pages, the more they're gonna be able to find those pages and get them indexed into their search engine. If you don't do a good job job linking them, then you could have pages that sit on your site but Google never knows about them. So in that case, if Google doesn't know about them, they're not going to be able to rank them for you. So the sitemap is a way to show Google and the other search engines all of the different pages that you have on your site. So we spend a lot of time with our Google sitemaps in particular, and I'll just show you a quick example. So if I go to my homepage, I have a link here that says Google Sitemaps, so I'm on here a lot. And I'll show you what I do with my sitemap just to kind of give you a sense. So we have a number of different sitemaps and we have some subdomains that we're testing out for our sitemaps, always running different tests on the site, but my main one here is for evancarmichael.com. This is my Google Webmaster Tools and everybody can have a Webmaster Tools account. If you click on Site Configuration, you'll be able to go to Sitemaps. And this will show you the different sitemaps that Google recognizes. So we have, you know, 9 sitemaps plus our main article sitemap and a blog sitemap. And if you click in on either of these, it'll show you kind of a detailed list of every page that we've indexed. So we use a tool that I'll talk about later to create the sitemap, but once you create the sitemap, you submit it to Google. You basically just go here, submit a sitemap, and you add in a URL. So EvanCarmichael.com, or this would be yourwebsite.com/whatever and put your sitemap in. Usually it's an XML type of feed, so that's why I see it here. And what's really beneficial is you can see if there's any problems with your sitemap. So here there's been a problem with the sitemap, so we have 11 pages submitted, 9 are indexed, and there's some issues, so we need to look at that and see what's going on. If we look at our main articles, we can see we have almost 60,000 that have been contributed to the sitemap and almost all of them are indexed. So it shows that the content is being picked up and is being indexed by Google. What you can do if you don't have as much content, I don't expect most people to have, you know, 100,000 pages of content on their site, what it can do is show you which pages are being indexed and which ones aren't, which is really important. So if you know that you're submitting pages to Google and they're not recognizing those pages, they're not in the index, maybe there's something wrong with those pages that you can fix up and resubmit so that they will be indexed. These other sitemaps are other files that we have on the site that could have pictures in them or forum posts or other things that they may not always get picked up, so we don't really care too much about these ones, but I pay a lot of attention to this. You know, if only half of our articles are being indexed, then that would be a major problem and we'd have to look at how we can fix those up. So that's, that's what's useful about the sitemaps. It helps the search engines know which articles are on your site and it helps you figure out which articles are being indexed and which ones aren't. And if there's any problems, they'll let you know. So that's a great way to do it. Now to create a sitemap, it can be super easy. You don't need to have a lot of technical experience to do it. So what I use, if I go to my favorite tools here, this is a page I use to showcase all the tools that I use to run my business. I use a free tool, free is always the magic word for business owners, it's called GSiteCrawler. GSiteCrawler is a free download that is a PC software you download onto your computer, you put in your URL, and basically what it will do is crawl your website like Google. So it will start on your homepage and then start going to all the subpages, and then it will create a sitemap for you. So to create that sitemap, it has to be in a specific language that the search engines understand. And if you're not a very technical person, it can be a little overwhelming to try to create that. So what we'll do is use GSiteCrawler. We'll do this once a month for our site because we have a lot of ongoing stuff that's happening with our business. If you don't have a lot of changes, then you don't need to do it as frequently. But this program does two cool things. One, it creates a sitemap and will automatically, you know, generate that file which all you have to do is upload to your website and then go back to Google and click Submit a sitemap and put in the URL. The other really cool thing about it is it'll tell you if there's any errors with your website. So it'll tell you if there's any crawl errors. So you might be linking to a page that doesn't exist anymore because you've updated it or you changed your template or you're trying to pull in a picture that doesn't exist. It tells you what those errors are and gives you a big list that tells you where the errors are generated from and what you need to do to fix it. So that's great to either do yourself or give to your technical guy to be able to go in and make those site changes because the more of those kind of broken links you have or broken images somewhere on your website, the more of those you have, the worse it looks for Google and you could potentially have a penalty hit on your site. Usually those types of errors are not on your homepage, they're buried deep on some old page that you haven't updated for years. But if you have enough of them, that could look bad in the search engine's eyes. So you definitely want to fix those up. And again, GSitecrawler does that for you and it's completely free. So Stan, I hope that helps answer your question. If you guys liked the video, please give the video a thumbs up below. I always appreciate seeing those thumbs ups coming in. And if you have any comments, or if you're using a different program, I'd love to hear from you if you want to leave a comment under the video, and I'll always do my best to respond to you, or maybe even make a video reply. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
