Isulong SEOPH Episode 7: Updating the Sitemap

Welcome to this episode of the Isulong SEOPH Podcast on updating sitemaps but not homepages.

Does updating the Sitemap and not the homepage have any impact, as far as your search engine visibility is concerned?

In the case of the Isulong SEOPH Podcast homepage, you'll find links only to the first five articles in this site, plus a link to the Sitemap and the Contact Us page. In this particular experiment, what will happen if we just update the Sitemap (and not the homepage) when we add more articles?

At first, the ranking of InMyEar.com dropped all the way down to page 5 of the search engine results. It looks like the other sites, whose homepages keep getting updated with links to new posts, were rising up the SE results. You begin to wonder if search engines treat a non-changing homepage as a cobweb site.

Do blogs have an advantage over seemingly static web sites?

After leaving this site alone for about four days, you'll discover that new pages are indeed indexed by the search engines, even if the link to these new pages appears in the Sitemap (and not in the homepage). And you'll also find that the site does climb up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) after a while.

So, no, blogs don't necessarily have an edge over seemingly static non-blogs. At least, not in this case.

What exactly does "ranking" mean, by the way? In the next article, you will find out that your web site's position depends on how you made your search online.

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