#sitemap-penalty Q: Some folks have claimed that their sites were penalized after they submitted Sitemaps. Is this a coincidence? A: Yes. Google will not penalize you for submitting a Sitemap. Sitemaps provide an extra way for us to understand what pages you have on your site, and can help speed up the discovery of new and updated pages on your site. But neither HTML nor XML Sitemaps replace the normal crawling process. Having a Sitemap will not increase your ranking in Google's search results pages—but it will not reduce it, either. #sitemap-submitted-url-count Q: Why is my Sitemap file showing a submitted URL count that does not match the number of entries in my Sitemap file? A: The number of submitted URLs reflects the number of unique URLs submitted in your Sitemap file, not the number of entries in the file. Should Google find a significant number of duplicate URLs, we may limit the number of URLs that we include for this count. You can resolve this issue by making sure that your Sitemap file does not contain duplicate URLs. |