Resubmitting My Sitemap - If only One Page Has been removed or added.

[DavidZA1]

Hi Guys

Is it really necessary to re-submit my sitemap to WMT if only one page has been removed?

Can't you just manually remove them using the "Remove Urls" tool in WMT?

Or just add a "noindex, nofollow" on that specific page?

Or is it best practice to re-submit a sitemap when a specific page has been removed or added to your site.

Wouldn't it cause a delay in causing Google to perhaps re-index your whole site again because you resubmitted your sitemap and in the process loose some rankings?

If somebody could maybe shed some light on this, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

David

[Mike.Goracke]

Hi David,

If you do not have the time to resubmit, you do not need to right away; however, if you continue to remove pages from your site, you should update your sitemap to reflect your site's actual structure.

If you leave it there, you are telling Google, "Hey, I got this page about XYZ. You should crawl it." And if you remove that page, you aren't providing Google with accurate information. You will probably receive a message about it in WMT saying that your sitemap was not fully indexed.

You shouldn't be concerned about causing delay in Google recrawling your site and you should not expect any decrease in rankings. Just because you submit an updated sitemap, doesn't mean Google is going to drop everything to recrawl your site. It may take a week for Google to get around to reindexing everything. And as long as the content and URL structure on the rest of your pages hasn't changed, you can expect your ranking to me more or less the same.

Hope this helps.

Mike