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Sitemaps might not be the most sexy subject in the world of web design and development but certain events that happened to our website now mean we take them very seriously. In this case study we look at how and why an XML sitemap temporarily destroyed our web sales - but first lets look at why we need an XML sitemap.

Why an XML sitemap?

The answer is simple. We did it because Google made it clear that it was a good thing. All the major search engines adhere to the Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as dictated by sitemaps.org and so for commercial reasons we didn’t want to miss out on any benefits that having an XML sitemap gave. Though it has always been a challenge to generate an XML sitemap. It can take a long time to scan a larger sites and create the file, however once your done the XML sitemap allows you to tell the search engines about the URLs on your website in a way they can understand.

 

If you look at the Google Webmaster guidelines they explain what the standard format and definitions are. In the initial Overview they state quite casually:

 

“Note that using this protocol will not influence the way your pages are ranked by Google”.

 

I beg to differ because we recently discovered empirically just how powerful this XML sitemap is for our website, and got a real shock at the speed with which the changes can take place.

 

How we ended up in XML sitemap hell

At Stinky Ink we run a UK based printer consumables company, and our website http://www.stinkyinkshop.co.uk gets a couple of thousand visitors a day organically. So as you would expect, visitors from Google make up a share of that traffic.

 

But for one week in June this year our traffic took a hammering, and here’s how it happened.

 

Day 1: Thursday 5/6/2008 - As part of our regular checks and tweaks to our website we had a look at our XML sitemap with the aim of making sure it was set up as efficiently as possible. We made some changes,  and uploaded our revised XML sitemap to the server and went home.

 

Day 2: Friday 6/6/2008 - Friday morning when we downloaded our overnight orders they looked a bit low and then during the day we noticed the phones were quieter than usual too.

 

Day 3: Saturday 7/6/2008 - Over the weekend the website processes orders we check and send on Monday.

 

Day 4: Sunday 8/6/2008 - Over the weekend the website processes orders we check and send on Monday.

 

Day 5: Monday 9/6/2008 - On Monday morning when we arrived and downloaded orders our concern grew - orders had fallen even more and during the day the phones were quiet too.

 

Day 6: Tuesday 10/6/2008 - By Tuesday morning it was red alert and real panic had set in after another night of low orders. We looked at the visitor stats for the four-day period and saw pretty quickly Google traffic was way down. 

 

The only change that we had made to the website in the previous week prior to the slump was to the XML file! We had no doubts about the required action and changed it back to how it was and uploaded the file back to the root directory.

 

Day 7: Wednesday 11/6/2008 - By Wednesday we were back to normal. Overnight order levels were good, visitor numbers were back to their ‘normal’ levels and the phones started to ring again.

 

 

XML sitemap changes can impact fast

We were quite stunned that the changes and priority settings in the XML file we had made affected the website so quickly and dramatically. With hindsight, we can only conclude that how you set up your XML sitemap is absolutely crucial to the performance of your site within Google.

“In a little over 12 hours changes to the sitemap had started to kill our business”

 

What we realised was that the sitemap software set its own priorities based on the hierarchy of the database.

Pages that were important to sales had been given a lower priority value because of where they were in relation to the database.

 

I am now going to tell you what we did, how we corrected it and finally how we strengthened our business by tweaking the sitemap so that it benefited us. Our database is a static Access database and its structure is shown in Fig 1

Our site is structured as follows:

Index Page - Targets generic search terms as you would expect (i.e. printer ink, hp ink, Epson ink, canon ink etc).

 

Main Sections – These are optimised for a specific manufacturer.

 

Manufacturer’s Printers  - Optimised for specific printers. This focus onto the printer gives us a lot of our quality traffic.

 

We do get a lot of visitors coming in via the homepage but we have found over the years that the front-page visitors are far more generic and convert less well into orders than the specific printer traffic. Thus the specific printer traffic is crucial.

 

The automated sitemap generation software set its own priorities based on the hierarchy of the database. As a result it set our Printer Priority to 0.4 because it was 3 stages down from the Index. 

 

Note: Fig 1 shows it as it is now at 0.9 the correct value!

 

After the changed happened we analysed our log files the next week, we saw that the traffic onto the front page was unaffected, but our printer specific visitor traffic had dropped by 80%. Search terms that we had been on the first page of Google for many months were gone and lost in the index…

 

Avoiding this again in the future

On the Tuesday following we set the priorities as they are shown above and uploaded our revised sitemap, which pinged Google and on Wednesday all was sweetness and light again.

When Google say that the XML sitemap will not affect your sites ranking, they are technically correct. If you have no Page Rank or links into your site a sitemap will not do anything beneficial for you. However if you have an established business online, be very careful how you set the priorities for your site.

Bear in mind that so far as we can see, Google treats your priorities as a Relative relationship; with your index page being 1 and all of the rest of your pages being indexed relative to that 1, but bear in mind that your index page can never be higher than 1.

 

So each website owner needs to know where their priority pages are on the site beyond the homepage and ensure they assign appropriate values to those pages. They may not be ones one level down from the homepage as automated software reading a typical database will tend to assume.

“…if you have an established business online, be very careful how you set the priorities for your site.”

Once you visualise how the Sitemap works it becomes a powerful tool in promoting key pages within your site, but what it can’t do is give you something that you don’t already have.

 

What we have learnt:

1. XML sitemap’s will NOT necessarily improve your sites rank in the search engines, but they can significantly damage how the search engines report your results

 

2. XML sitemap’s have a very fast impact on your search engine placing.Any other changes we make take several days/weeks/months to impact, XML sitemap’s impact in hours

 

3. But XML sitemap generators should come with a health warning!

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 2:09 pm and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.