If your company engaged a website developer (it is important here to make the distinction between “developer” and “designer”) in the last 10 years or so it is likely that an .xml sitemap was submitted to Google upon launch of the website.
The Restaurant Simile
Think of an .xml sitemap as the first menu you handed Google at the opening of your restaurant. All the house specialties and staples are there (Home Page, About Us, Contact Page), the dishes you want to serve year after year. But what about the daily specials (blogs & articles)? What happens if you take an item off the menu or a certain food item is taken off the market (industry news and updates)? The menu needs to be constantly updated to give your diners (Google in this simile) an accurate picture of what you serve.
The same goes for your .xml sitemap. While they can be set to automatically re-submit themselves to Google for analysis, there is a good chance that not all of the pages or blog posts being submitted are relevant anymore. You probably have blogs, articles, and pages with out of date or flat out inaccurate information on them and Google doesn’t want to see that.
Now is the time to put in some elbow grease, go back through every page, blog, and article on your website and doing some scrubbing. Google wants up-to-the-minute information, so while an archive of blogs that dates back 10 years might seem like it shows thought leadership, it is actually hurting your SEO.
At Scribendi we understand the delicate balance of creating compelling, timely, relevant content and catering the technical structure of those posts and pages to meet Google’s ever changing standards. To schedule a website analysis or to just sit down and talk, give us a call at (339) 244-4222 or fill out our contact form!