There is a thread (http://groups.drupal.org/node/11304) over at the Search Engine Optimization group, among other things talking about how the XML Sitemap isn't really necessary if you have a good link structure. Another problem with that module are that the sitemaps are not nicely formatted or human-readable. There is another module that makes nice sitemaps that are really easy to format: http://drupal.org/project/site_map. Maybe this module should be referenced in the SEO Checklist instead of the XML sitemap?

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ben finklea’s picture

ben finklea commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)

I added the Site Map module to the new version of the checklist but I left in the XML Sitemap since many still consider it helpful - and indeed, Google says to do it. The XML sitemap is especially helpful if you don't have clean URLs turned on or if you have orphaned pages - which a lot of landing pages are. I'll upload to the CVS later. In the meantime, you can test it here: http://drupal.org/node/222659#comment-1192246.