Case Study: The Importance of Search Console Setup and Submitting Sitemaps

The XML sitemap is a primary place that search engines, including Google, start their crawls of your website. This is because they include a list of URLs that we want those search engines to index, rank and drive traffic back to our website.

In the case of this global hotel group, we identified that the main "sitemap index" (the place where all different sitemaps are stored) was not returning any information for search engines - it had a server error (500 error) which is a sign to Google that we are not maintaining the technical aspects of our website well.

I worked closely with the development team to isolate the issue causing this critical error, and once this was fixed, I had to take steps to ensure that Google could recognise the fix as quickly as possible:

• Resubmit the XML sitemap index to Google Search Console

• Monitor if all sitemaps were now visible to Google

We saw the impact of this immediately:

Since implementation of the fix for the global sitemap index:

• 2,500+ pages were instantly indexed that had been accidentally hidden from Google

• 587 XML sitemaps that were previously ignored by Google were now visible and being crawled regularly

For a global business such as this one, being able to ensure that any country / market's URL changes would be indexed through their sitemaps working was a major win - however, without an SEO to be on hand to monitor and use Google Search Console, they would have continued without this extra visibility on a global scale.

If you would like to organise a technical SEO audit or search tool setup, visit my services page and contact me for a free initial call.