Can Sitemap Errors Create a Ranking Issue?

[member22]

Is it necessary to have a sitemap in the webmaster tools for google or can google find my website withtout one ?

I have an old sitemap on my site and see that my site changed I know have crawling errors in the webmastertools is that an issue ?

I tried to recreate a sitemap using a generator online, however it is seeing things that are not on my site... it is seeing a link that was deactivated 2 days ago ( I am not sure those generators works " perfectly " would you recommend creating a sitemap manually ?

Finally I noticed with one sitemap generator that I have duplicate content
www.homepage.com and www.homepage.com/homepage.html

Can this be an issue in ranking on google ?

[tedster]

XML sitemaps are not necessary in many cases - but they can be a help for very large sites or sites that publish new content very frequently.

Sitemap errors don't seem to affect rankings directly - assuming the error is only in the sitemap and not actually on the server. However, if a sitemap generation tool crawls your site and shows you "bad" URLs, that's usually a sign that you have some technical issues to fix.

Google can adapt to many common kinds of errors these days, but they sometimes don't. So it is best to take what the tool tells you seriously and investigate.

[anallawalla]

I don't think that crawl errors in WMT relate to your old sitemap being out of sync with the live site. The sitemap is taken as a hint but it won't make Google index the site any faster. It will, however, let Google grab the pages with higher priority first.