SitemapXML v.2

[a_berezin]

Hi,

Since 21 April 2015, Google has been giving much more attention to these areas:

1, Mobile Responsiveness - sites that are not compliant with mobile efficiency factors are starting to drop down the rankings - not because Google drops them down, but because your competitors are Improving their sites faster than you are. They are "leap-frogging" you and this is the major cause of steady falls in SE ranking.
2. Pagespeed. The faster your site loads, the better the search engines (and customers) like it. Faster sites will get more favourable ranking than slower sites.
3. Structured data markup. While this is not yet having a major impact on results ranking, the use of structured data makes your content more "understandable" to google and it will know how to place your links into search results that are more relevant to the search terms a person uses. In many cases, it may appear you are climbing the rankings, but the reality is that competitors are falling lower - you are now doing the leap-frogging.

To me, these three issues are amongst the more important, so we focus on getting the site's software to comply with what is now expected by Google.

Sure... get the sitemap and URL issue sorted out - but the real issues with good ranking are in 1, 2, and 3 above.

Yes, it's true. But first we must get tired of all the errors on the site, remove all duplicates, all broken links, all unnecessary redirects, build unique meta tags, etc. etc. etc. And then we can think about fine-tuning.