Your actor website now generates and maintains its own sitemap. Add a page and it appears in it. Change a page and its date updates. Hide a page and it comes out.
What a sitemap is doing
It is a list of every address on your site, at a standard location, that search engines look for. They will find your pages eventually without one by following links, but a sitemap makes it faster and more complete, particularly for pages that are only linked from one place.
It is not a ranking factor. It is a discovery mechanism, and a page that has not been discovered cannot rank at all.
What it includes
- Every visible page, with its last modified date.
- Individual gallery, project and blog pages, not just the listings above them.
- Your press kit and resume pages if they are public.
Hidden pages, drafts and anything you have excluded are left out. A sitemap that lists a page which returns nothing is worse than one that omits it.
The date field matters
Most hand-maintained sitemaps carry a fake date, usually today's, on every entry. Search engines learn to ignore a sitemap that claims everything changed this morning.
Ours carries the real date each page last changed, which means a genuine update is a genuine signal and gets looked at sooner.
Notification
When something meaningful changes we ping the search engines that accept a notification, rather than waiting for the next crawl. For a site that is crawled infrequently, which describes most individual actor sites, this is the difference between a new page being indexed in days and in weeks.
What it will not fix
A page with nothing on it. A sitemap gets a page looked at; whether it ranks depends on whether there is anything there. Empty and near-empty pages are covered in the pages screen, and the wider argument is in the importance of good content.
Related
The other technical SEO work: canonical URLs, per-page titles and descriptions, and the routing fix, which is what stopped some pages being reachable in the first place.
Create a free actor website and it will be in a sitemap from the first day.
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