How to Use Content Governance to Shape Better Sitemaps

Recently, I was tasked with creating a sitemap of a fairly large site with hundreds of sub-domains and several thousand pages. The majority of the sub-domains on the site were related to individual departments, academic programs, research initiatives, and faculty profiles. 

The Existing Content Challenge

While trying to replicate the existing sitemap structure, I had to rely on the website’s navigation to confirm the location of content and its relation to the main site. I was constantly taken away from the main website into subdomains that featured different navigation menus and breadcrumb structures. I also encountered various versions of admissions and program pages scattered across departmental and program-specific websites. From a user experience perspective, it was confusing.  

Creating the existing sitemap presented a challenge in grouping content into logical categories (navigation towers) due to inconsistent URL structures, subdomains and folder naming conventions. After filtering out outdated events, alerts, profiles and unused subdomains, the actual number of relevant pages was reduced to 20% of the original total. All of this chaos negatively affected both the onsite search experience and search engine rankings.

This  raises a question about how the client ended up in this situation? The current marketing/web team was handed a legacy system that evolved over time. Too many users had been given access to create and manage content, resulting in websites that had become unwieldy and difficult to maintain. As these issues came to light,one thing became clear – there was a fundamental lack of content governance.

Content governance can have a significant impact on the structure and organization of a website’s sitemap. A sitemap is essentially a blueprint of how a website is structured, while content governance refers to the policies, guidelines, and strategies that shape the creation, management, and optimization of that content. Here’s how content governance influences sitemaps:

1. Content Structure and Hierarchy

• Consistency in Layout: Content governance enforces standardized categorization and structure, ensuring similar content types follow a consistent format. This consistency helps group sections or pages more logically in the sitemap, making it easier for search engines to index and for users to navigate.
• Logical Flow: Proper governance promotes a coherent flow of information allowing the sitemap to reflect a clear content hierarchy where high-priority pages appear at the top level and supporting content is nested below. 

2. Content Quality and Removal of Redundant Content

• Reducing Duplicates: Content governance policies help identify redundant or outdated content streamlining to sitemap and improving clarity.
• Pruning Outdated Content: Governance policies ensure regular audits, allowing obsolete or irrelevant content to be removed from the sitemap, ensuring up-to-date and relevant content.

3. SEO and Metadata Management

• Optimized URLs and Tags: Content governance defines best practices  for URL structures, meta tags, and keyword usage, ensuring every page listed in the sitemap supports SEO goals. This helps search engines understand the importance and relevance of each page, improving ranking potential.
• Canonical Tags and Redirects: When content is reorganized, merged, or removed, governance policies ensure the proper use of canonical tags and redirects, so search engines can update the sitemap accordingly.

4. User Experience and Accessibility

• Improved Navigation: Structured content governance leads to intuitive content organization user-friendly sitemap structures.
• Mobile and Accessibility Compliance: Content governance policies often include guidelines on mobile responsiveness and WCAG compliance which can prioritize pages in the sitemap that support diverse users’ needs.

5. Content Lifecycle Management

• Version Control and Archiving: Governance policies help manage content lifecycles, archiving or removing outdated pages from the sitemap.
• Frequency of Updates: Governance around content refresh rates may define how frequently dynamic content like news and blogs are updated and reflected in XML sitemaps.

6. Compliance and Legal Considerations

• Privacy and Security: Content governance ensures pages related to privacy policies, terms and conditions, and other legal documentation are prominently placed in the sitemap.
• Age-Appropriate and Region-Specific Content: Content governance may enforce inclusion or exclusion of certain pages based on legal or regional content requirements. 

7. Localization and Globalization

• Multilingual Sitemaps:Content governance for multilingual or regional content, ensures the sitemap accounts for different versions of the website for various regions or languages. 

8. Content Categorization and Tagging

• Clear Categorization: Governance frameworks often establish rules for categorizing and tagging content making it easier for both users and search engines to find relevant pages.
• Tagging for Search Engines: Governance ensures proper use of tags for structured data (e.g., Schema.org), which can impact how content is listed in the sitemap and how search engines interpret it.

Conclusion

Effective content governance directly influences how a website’s sitemap is structured, optimized, and maintained. By enforcing content quality, consistency, SEO best practices, and legal standards, content governance helps build a sitemap that’s not only user-friendly but also favorable for search engine indexing.