The fact that XML sitemaps could possibly affect crawling and indexing by search engines has been a long-time speculation. I even remember being at SES Chicago 2007 and sitting in on a session about sitemaps and the representative from Google, when asked if an XML sitemap could speed up the time a site was crawled and indexed, responded “no.” Maybe it was just a front or maybe even he didn’t know at the time; however, according to a recent test conducted by SEOMoz there is proof that submitting an XML sitemap to Google and Yahoo will impact the rate at which your site gets crawled.

The test was conducted using 12 different blog posts; of which six had sitemaps submitted and six did not. The results showed that those blog posts that had submitted XML sitemaps got crawled faster than the blog posts that did not. The graphs below give a more visual picture of the test results.

When a sitemap was submitted, it took the crawler an average time of 14 minutes on Google and 245 minutes on Yahoo to crawl the blog posts. When a sitemap was not submitted, it took the crawler and average 1375 minutes on Google and 1773 minutes on Yahoo.

Although crawl times can be increased with XML sitemap submission, this is still not guaranteed. However, it’s one of those things to consider because it certainly doesn’t hurt you, it can only help. With that said, why not just do it?

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