Adding a Google Sitemap cannot hurt your rankings – it’s official

To give Google a Sitemap or to not give Google a sitemap? That is the question. For a longtime there’s been a lot of hear say flying around about the potential damage Sitemaps can do to your websites rankings. Damage reported by webmasters include pages going supplemental and rankings dropping.

So is adding a Sitemap dangerous? Is it really worth the potential risk? I was lucky enough to put those questions to Matt Cutts today at Webmaster World Pubcon in Las Vegas. His answer was hat there is no way that adding a Sitemap will have an adverse effect on your rankings.

My advice is that if you have big site or add pages or products frequently then go ahead and submit a Google Sitemap and don’t worry about it hurting your rankings. The result will be better, faster, fresher crawls and that can only be a good thing.