Omitting URLs from XML Sitemap - Bad??

[seo32]

Hi all,

We are working on an extremely large retail site with some major duplicate content issues that we are  in the process of remedying. The site also does not currently have an XML sitemap.

Would it be advisable to create a small XML sitemap with only the main category pages for the time being, and then after our duplicate content issues are resolved, uploading the complete sitemap? Or should we wait to upload anything until all work is complete down to the product page level and canonicals are in place? Will uploading a incomplete sitemap be fraudulent or misleading in the eyes of the search engines and prompt a penalty, or would having at least the main pages mapped while we continue work be okay?

Please let me know if more info is needed to answer! Thanks in advance!

[Saijo.George]

My Theory On this ( I have no tests to prove this )

If you upload a verified site map thats is essentially telling Google these are the important pages on my site. would you want to risk the importance of the other pages by telling Google you consider only the few important categories as the important ones . They wont drop the other pages completely but MIGHT see them as less important .

I really don't see Google penalizing a site for incomplete sitemaps.

If you have a really large site you might also want to look in to multiple sitemaps : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2006/10/multiple-sitemaps-in-same-directory.html

You might also want to look in to the best situations to use rel canonical vs a 301 redirect .

[Thos003]

I ran my site with an incomplete site map for years and didn't seem to have a negative effect. I feel that any site map is better than no sitemap. Sitemaps are such a small part of the SEO equation. What they are most useful for is telling Google what to crawl. Beyond that, I don't believe they have much relevance in passing authority.

[seo32]

Hi Saijo,

Thanks for your recommendations! We do want to place a little more emphasis on our top level and main navigation pages, so I think we will probably proceed with a preliminary sitemap with just those pages for now. Once we get to that point, we'll definitely be needing to use multiple sitemaps and an index - thanks for pointing this out!

[seo32]

Hi Thomas,

Definitely comforting to hear that you ran your site with an incomplete sitemap without seeing any negative results. Like I said in my response above, I think we will proceed with the partial sitemap, just to have one on there, and then upload a complete one once we can clean up the site a little more. Thanks for your insights - they were very helpful!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Some good answers here, so I'll just throw in my own 2 cents.

The purpose of a sitemap is to help search engines find pages they might not otherwise find during a regular crawl. Sometimes sitemaps can help pages get indexed faster. Other sitemaps serve special purposes, such as News or Video sitemaps, which can add extra information and help ranking particular types of content.

In reality, many, many sitemaps are incomplete, missing, or flat out wrong. To my knowledge, no search engine will penalize you for this, as they would be penalizing half the web.

The danger of an inaccurate sitemap is that the search engines may chose to ignore it completely. Daune Forrester of Bing has stated that if they find a 1% error rate in your sitemap file, then they will disregard the file. However, no such action is known to exist for incomplete sitemaps.

So I'd say there is little in submitting a sitemap of your truly important page. Unfortunately, this won't stop Google from discovering or crawling your duplicate content issues.

The faster you get these fixed, the better.