Most search engine optimization experts will likely tell you about the importance of backlinks, keyword structure, and all the other fundamentals of good SEO. Another topic that comes up all the time is that of sitemaps and most people will tell you that you should have a good sitemap for your website that is kept up to date. But that may not necessarily be the case.

Over on Search Engine Roundtable, they're highlighting a thread that discusses what happens if you choose to remove the XML sitemap completely from Webmaster tools. Conventional wisdom will say that this will have an adverse effect on your overall search engine rankings, but that might not be the case.

In fact, John Mueller of Google says that removing the URLs from a sitemap won't really hurt your rankings, because sitemap files are used "for discovering new URLs and recognizing when existing ones have changed; we don't remove URLs from the index that aren't in the Sitemap file." But that only talks about removing URLs from the sitemap and not removing the sitemap altogether.

That said, it seems that adding and removing sitemaps doesn't "dramatically impact a website," as long as you "make sure your internal link structure is good and the iste has no big technical issues." That insight comes from forum moderator GoodROI.

What do you think? Are sitemaps still important?

There are certain tools that just about every website owner is bound to use. You're probably using Google Analytics, for example, to keep track of your visitor demographics, traffic sources, and so on. Google Webmaster Tools is another one of those go-to utilities that just about everyone uses. And it just got a little bit better.

Barry Schwartz over at SE Roundtable has put up a post telling us that Webmaster Tools now comes with a couple of new features. One of them is that you can test your sitemaps before officially submitting them. Before, you had to submit the sitemap and wait to see if any issues arise. Now, you can do that ahead of time.

And it's really easy to use too. After logging into your Google Webmaster Tools account, get into Sitemaps from the Site Configuration link as you normally would. Then, click on the button at the top right with "add/test sitemap" and enter the appropriate URL. Instead of clicking on the blue button with "submit sitemap," click on the grey "test sitemap" buton.

Give Google a few moments to do its thing and then it'll tell you that the test are complete. Click to view the results and it'll give you a quick summary, telling you about the content in the sitemap and if there are any errors detected. This can be a real timesaver and it makes sure that your submitted sitemap is error-free right from the get-go!

Have you tried this new feature? What else would you change in Webmaster Tools to make it better?