I have been using wordpress plugin Google XML Sitemaps to generate sitemaps.xml .The sitemaps.xml is in the directory I had specified and gets updated with the frequency defined.

Still when I try to for google webmaster to read the sitemaps.xml , it  shows failure. The error message I see

Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.

I spend lot of time looking around and wondering what could be wrong.  Is the plugin nor working ?

Finally I realized that I was submitting directory and not file name assuming google would pick up sitemap.xml .

So the url would be

http://www.skill-guru.com/blog/filename.xml

This question has come up again time and again if sitemaps are really important and do they help in boosting up your rankings. I am not sure how will it affect your rankings but a sitemap does help search engine to crawl your site and understand all the links. Some SEO’s do claim that sitemaps do help in boosting your rankings.

If your site is dynamic website and has new contents being churned out frequently , sitemaps are really important.

Quoting google webmaster

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

I will give one example of sitemaps in dynamic websites. Sites like  Stackoverflow have a sitemap.xml file is created which contains a link to every question posted on the system. When a new question is posted, they simply append another entry to the end of the sitemap file. Read more…