The Importance Of XML Sitemaps In The Age Of Panda

Columnist Janet Driscoll Miller reminds us that in an age of content syndication, a well-maintained XML sitemap is key to establishing your site as the original source of your content.

In the early days of search engines, I wasn’t much of a believer in XML sitemaps. But over time, I began to see first hand how they can benefit websites.
XML sitemaps serve as a way to communicate directly with the search engines, alerting them to new or changed content very quickly and helping to ensure that the content is indexed faster.
For content publishers, it’s become critical to help Google specifically understand if your site is the original publisher of content. Why? Panda.

Content Syndication, Duplicate Content & Panda

It’s not uncommon for publishers to syndicate their content on other websites. Further, it’s also not uncommon for publishers to have their site’s content “curated” by other websites without a formal syndication agreement.
Unfortunately, the definition of content curation is fuzzy at best. In a quick Google search for a recent Search Engine Land article, I found over 47 copies of the article on other sites. (Editor’s note: these are not authorized copies.)
For every publisher site offering syndicated content or having content curated by others (with or without permission), the stakes could not be higher with Google. The Panda algorithm update focused in part on removing duplicate content from search engine results pages – meaning that if a site is not deemed the content originator, it’s at risk of being excluded from the results altogether.
XML sitemaps are just one tool that can help content creators establish their stake as the content originator.
Just how profound can XML sitemaps be for indicating content origination?
In theory, the content originator would likely have the earliest indexed time stamp for the content.
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