Will you use a sitemap?

[sarahk]

I'd be interested in the strength of the reaction of users to the sitemap idea...

[Yukio]

Any website serious about getting to the top in serach engine rankings would be utterly silly to not even have a sitemap. Not only does it allow google to index your website... it acts as a PR funnel for all your other pages.

[Design Agent]

Expect a 'yes' from anyone with common sense.

[Boston_JM]

1 thing would you even use one if there is not that many pages for one i dont see the point if all pages are interconected an the site does not have 1K pages ?

[Design Agent]

If its only a few pages then techincally your home page is a sitemap (for SE purposes). If you have many pages that arent listed on the home, or are buried then sitemap is a way to make sure that all pages are 2 clicks from the home + easily spiderable.

[SHT]

Yes, Site map was launched whilst I was on vacation. Within 2 hours of returning I had submitted it to google. As Design Agent said anyone with common sense will use it.

[Roze]

Yes, done already! I have 3 sections of my site where I moved URL's and pages around and G has not yet found them (or taken old URL's out of the cache for that matter...) I submitted simple text lists of the new URL's today - hopefully it will inspire the crawlers.

[ephricon]

I'm not all that giggly about this. Whether or not you have a large site, lets say you already have all your pages in the index - then how does this help? In my understanding it doesn't - only if you have difficulty getting all your pages indexed...

[Tuning]

Will definetly recommend it. Sitemap makes crawling quicker in theway every page is reachable from level 2.

Regards,
Tuning

[Design Agent]

I'm not all that giggly about this. Whether or not you have a large site, lets say you already have all your pages in the index - then how does this help? In my understanding it doesn't - only if you have difficulty getting all your pages indexed...

I use a sitemap in this way:

1. Put a link sitewide to the sitemap high up in the code.
2. Use <Hx> tags for links to categories on the sitemap page.
3. Use exact anchors.
4. Point some external links to the sitemap.

Its a good way to get pages spidered if you dont want the link on the homepage and its useful for visitors. I dont see any harm in using one.

[tflight]

For me, I think it will be valuable to be able to tell Google how often to index certain pages. I think it will also be valuable to tell Google which pages are important. Both of those are possible with the new Google Sitemap feature.

I have a few sites with a large number of pages. Google currently indexes all of the pages almost daily. I could save some bandwidth by telling Google that certain pages don't really need to be indexed daily.

I also have pages that I would like to assign lower priorities too. Pages where people are presented with login forms, lost password procedures, etc are not vital to the content of my site. Telling Google that those pages are not a priority compared to my news pages would be nice.

I've written about this a little bit here:

http://www.timflight.com/2005/06/03/submit-google-sitemaps-xml/

[Design Agent]

For me, I think it will be valuable to be able to tell Google how often to index certain pages. I think it will also be valuable to tell Google which pages are important. Both of those are possible with the new Google Sitemap feature.

I have a few sites with a large number of pages. Google currently indexes all of the pages almost daily. I could save some bandwidth by telling Google that certain pages don't really need to be indexed daily.

I also have pages that I would like to assign lower priorities too. Pages where people are presented with login forms, lost password procedures, etc are not vital to the content of my site. Telling Google that those pages are not a priority compared to my news pages would be nice.

I've written about this a little bit here:

http://www.timflight.com/2005/06/03/submit-google-sitemaps-xml/

Here perhaps ? ;)

[WhatiFind]

I use a sitemap in this way:

1. Put a link sitewide to the sitemap high up in the code.
2. Use <Hx> tags for links to categories on the sitemap page.
3. Use exact anchors.
4. Point some external links to the sitemap.

Its a good way to get pages spidered if you dont want the link on the homepage and its useful for visitors. I dont see any harm in using one.

Nice todo list for one of my new sites!

In various site I've build the sitemap is an essential part of the site. For one reason, people visiting the site can easily find all of the topics and for SEO reasons I got a deep crawl/indexed by the mayor search engines.

[North Carolina SEO]

Not having a sitemap is like not having an index in a book (IMHO). When someone doesn't find what they are looking for (e.g. search engine or person), then having a sitemap gives them a quick idea whether it is anywhere within your site.

Considering that having too many (defined as?) outbound links on your home page could reduce the impact each link has then utilizing the sitemap to perform that function only seems reasonable.

Some may say that a great menu could overcome a lot of this but, you still run into the issue of quantity of outbound links from the page. Having the search engine spiders find your homepage and then only 1 link away reach your sitemap makes it quick and easy to perform a deep crawl of the remaining pages on your site.

IMHO, it's obvious Google considers this a major issue or why else would they be in beta with the Google Sitemap Protocol?

[Smyrl]

I have site maps for most of my sites.

My read on this thread is this. How many of us are going to join the Google bandwagon a creat a special feed to Google with our sitemaps. For the time being I am not. Things are running smoothly the way they are. If things slow down on indexing and Google fed site map seems only way to go will do so. Now if I had large e-commerce site with deep pages would be working on site map now.

Shannon

[ian_ok]

I've submitted 4 of my sites and one of them doesn't even come up in Google so I'll and no doubt others will be keen to see if G offers me position 2.8 billion or keeps in the Sandbox.


Forever hopeful.

[dazzlindonna]

I just submitted one for one of my newest sites that Google has not yet spidered. It contains dynamic urls of the format www.blah.com?catid=95 . The status of the submission is still showing "pending" (after 20 minutes), so I'll be watching to see when (if?) it gets approved. Then, I'll be watching like a hawk to see if gbot comes by and whether or not it does a good job of grabbing all the urls.

[T0PS3O]

Any website serious about getting to the top in serach engine rankings would be utterly silly to not even have a sitemap.

What does that make me? I have more top 10 positions than you can count on a 100 people's hands and none have a sitemap.

IMO it's only necessary for sites which have poor navigation or if you target search engines which have dumb spiders.

I opted for 'Yes will do but low priority.' since I doubt it will have a profound effect. I will do it since Google wouldn't making this available if it was a boatload of crap so it must have some benefits at some point. But it sounds like 'feeding the information hungry' to me whilst things work perfectly without this.

I'll have to see if an osCommerce contrib is available that does this with keeping Ultimate SEO urls intact. If so, I'll do it asap, if not it stays at the very bottom of my to-do list.

Still think I'm 'utterly silly'?

[tradefor]

It looks like, so far, I am the only geezer to vote:
"I'm going to wait until everyone else has given feedback on their experiences" . :D

I voted this way even though, at the suggestion of Minstrel, I actually made a plain vanilla non-XML sitemap several days ago; in an effort to get Yahoo!/Slurp , not Google, to stop taking sips, and start taking gulps - that is, Index my whole site, not just the darn start page and the Links (!!) page.

I sympathize greatly with NJHI (below). As yet, to me HTML stands for: Highly Techie and Maddening to Learn; while XML is an acronym for: Xtremely Maddening to Learn - despite some generous XML assistance from DP member JLerner.

I checked my site Google cache, and found the "old", simple sitemap was included; so at this point my priorities are cleaning my apalling kludge of HTML code, and reducing the page load time so that it is under "several Light Years on a T1 line" , rather than bodging up a XML sitemap.

re TPOS30- no one that reads the threads on this Forum can fail to respect your contributions; but I suspect that most SEO clients are a lot like me, spooked by the last thing they read. A sitemap, any sitemap, is probably a Good Idea to them, and they will want to see it, if only to impress their golfing buddies. :rolleyes:

[T0PS3O]

re TPOS30- no one that reads the threads on this Forum can fail to respect your contributions; but I suspect that most SEO clients are a lot like me, spooked by the last thing they read. A sitemap, any sitemap, is probably a Good Idea to them, and they will want to see it, if only to impress their golfing buddies. :rolleyes:

It seems like people think of a sitemap as the goal. I think it's a means of achieving a goal. And that goal, whether it's getting indexed or just user navigation, can be achieved by multiple means. I think a sitemap is only necessary when the site lacks in other areas that normally help to achieve these goals.

It won't hurt to have one though, even when the rest of your site is perfect.

[minstrel]

I use a sitemap in this way:

1. Put a link sitewide to the sitemap high up in the code.
2. Use <Hx> tags for links to categories on the sitemap page.
3. Use exact anchors.
4. Point some external links to the sitemap.

Its a good way to get pages spidered if you dont want the link on the homepage and its useful for visitors. I dont see any harm in using one.
DA, this thread is (I assume) about the new Google Sitemaps Beta (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/).

But I'm still not sure what advantage the Google "beta" has over a standard text-link-based sitemap linked from the home page, at least for most websites. It may be a more efficient way of launching a new site than the "Google Submit" page but other than that, what?

See also http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=17668

[Solicitors Mortgages]

all this talk about site maps on your site.....

whats the most links you can put on a one page site map?

is there any value splitting a site map into 50 pages?

[Phoenix Arizona]

Hi Sarah,

Funny thing is, as obvious as one would think a site map is, I just made one for my site about two months ago. Duh.

[minstrel]

Google recommends no more than 100 links on a page.

I don't know why you'd need 50 pages of sitemaps but if you have more than 100 pages you can divide them into logical or topical categories:

home page -> sitemap

sitemap -> cat1 -> pages in cat1
sitemap -> cat3 -> pages in cat2
sitemap -> cat3 -> pages in cat3

etc.

[Solicitors Mortgages]

minstrel.. in your opinion...would i need a site map then?
what you described sounds like my actual site navigation

home page to 12 regions, 12 regions to ~50 towns, each town to 50+ pages
...and linked back home again.

having a moment :o ... cant seem to get my head around this

home page -> sitemap sitemap -> cat1 -> pages in cat1
home page -> region region -> town -> pages in town

[minstrel]

Is it necessary? Perhaps not in most cases. But it won't hurt and it may help, depending on how your navigation links work and how the navigation is set up. I used to have a suspicion that some spiders would look for "sitemap" the way they look for robots.txt, although I will admit that the suspicion is only that, not based on any actual evidence, and may therefore be mere superstition.

What I usually recommend is creating a page with the filename sitemap.htm(l) with a text link to that page from the footer of the home page. Then, ALL the links from sitemap.htm(l) are set up as text links, as are links on any tertiary pages.

The other thing is, if possible, keep at least all your important pages with the first 3 levels of the navigation hierarchy (where home page is level 1, so no page is more than 2 clicks away from the home page). If you need to bump any pages to a lower level, make sure they are supplemental/secondary in importance.

[New Jersey Home Inspector]

As a non techie I can't for the life of me figure out how to implement the site map.

I would be happy to pay for assistance in setting the site map function for my web site.

Anyone interested please PM me with a cost payable via PayPals.


Thanks,

Michael

[minstrel]

See my post above, Michael. Perhaps wait a bit before you put out any real moneyt. The actual advantage may be negligible and even as a "non-techie" you should be able to rather easily add a regular sitemap as I described in my previous post (#26).

[dcristo]

As a non techie I can't for the life of me figure out how to implement the site map.

I would be happy to pay for assistance in setting the site map function for my web site.

Anyone interested please PM me with a cost payable via PayPals.


Thanks,

Michael

Michael,

Whipping up a sitemap is pretty straight forward even for us non-techies :D

As the name implies it maps to your entire site on the one page (or numerous pages if you have a huge site) Create a page named sitemap.html (or something similar) and link to every page on your site in a logical order. It's as easy as that. Make sure you link to your sitemap page from your home page, or it defeats the whole purpose of creating it. You want to make it easy for the search engine crawlers to come along and find every page on your site.

[jlawrence]

I'm glad people think creating a sitemap is straight forward - take a dynamically created site of iro 30K pages and creating a sitemap becomes very time consuming.
Even running something like sitemapper take me over 30 minutes to map the site.

[minstrel]

Yes but you're hardly describing an average site, jlawrence. And, as you note, there are programs to do it for you if you have a site like yours.

Xenu Links Checker will also create a sitemap for you if you wish, and it's free.

[jlawrence]

I would have thought that quite a lot of us have at least one affiliate site that's in excess of 10K pages with many running to more than 50K.
I'm in the process of trying to put together a comparison type site - which compares product prices from numerous affiliate feeds. I dread to think how many pages that's going to come to. It's also going to need a heck of a lot of IBL's to be effective, I'm sure it'll be fun to do ;)

[minstrel]

Maybe that's where Google's Sitemaps feature will come in handy, especially if automated. I'm still having difficulty seeing an advantage for most sites.

[jlawrence]

I'm also not sure of how useful it'll be.
I can see a use with regards to new sites as it makes the spider's just a little easier. But for already established sites, I'm dubious as to it's uses.

[dazzlindonna]

I think some of you are confusing the average, everyday sitemaps of old with what this thread is actually about...Google Sitemaps. The difference is that Google Sitemaps (the xml variety) has other sometimes useful parameters on them, other than just the urls. Such as how often each url is updated, and how important each url is in relation to the other urls. Granted, a small site with simple, static pages probably doesn't need this (or even the old-style sitemap, for that matter). But for large and/or dynamic sites that are having trouble getting ALL their pages indexed by Google, this is G's answer to solving that problem.

[Cheater]

I'm mainly using the Sitemap to allow Google to crawl my site more efficently.

E.g. The more active pages are crawled hourly while the less active are weekly.

This is pretty easy to do with a database driven site.

[dfsweb]

1 thing would you even use one if there is not that many pages for one i dont see the point if all pages are interconected an the site does not have 1K pages ?

I agree. Webmasters imo should use a site map for huge sites to ensure that all their pages are found and cached by Google and as a result get PageRanked. But, my photography (http://www.newzealandphotography.co.nz) site for example only has under 10 main pages and they are all interlinked to each other. The other sub-pages are linked from the image gallery pages that are PR4 and are cached on a regular basis and are PRed as well. So, I wouldn't use a site map for this site.

My directory (http://www.linknow.co.nz) on the other hand is set-up so that all category and sub-category pages are linked from the home page. I had done this to ensure that the category pages and sub-category pages get the maximum PR from the home page and the people who list their site with me get maximum traffic and PR benefits. Once again, I wouldn't set-up a site map for this site.

But, I would highly recommend a site-map for either webmasters with huge sites OR webmasters who have just introduced a new site. They could place a temporary site-map linked directly from the home page with links to all their pages. This would ensure that when Google comes around it would cache maximum pages from the site even though the site might be fairly new and only being cached once in a few weeks.

[minstrel]

I think some of you are confusing the average, everyday sitemaps of old with what this thread is actually about...Google Sitemaps.
I think so too... see post #21 in this thread.

The difference is that Google Sitemaps (the xml variety) has other sometimes useful parameters on them, other than just the urls. Such as how often each url is updated, and how important each url is in relation to the other urls. Granted, a small site with simple, static pages probably doesn't need this (or even the old-style sitemap, for that matter). But for large and/or dynamic sites that are having trouble getting ALL their pages indexed by Google, this is G's answer to solving that problem.
I think this is probably true -- the average site, even one with well-optimized dynamic pages, probably isn't going to see much difference.

[Cheater]

I think this is probably true -- the average site, even one with well-optimized dynamic pages, probably isn't going to see much difference.
Yeah it wont affect crawling patterns but it does allow you to edit Google's crawling patterns if you want.

Its very useful for me because one of my sites grows faster than Google can crawl it.
This makes sure that Google knows what has to be crawled instead of finding new links as it goes.

[ZuraX]

Is there a free Google SiteMap Generator? One that will let you put in the main URL and it makes the XML file?

[sarahk]

They've produced one using Python if your server supports that but over the weekend I've used generators for wordpress blogs, vbulletin forums and I've written one for any old site using a Xenu/Excel Macro combination

See:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=17891
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=17798
http://www.socialpatterns.com/search-engine-optimization/google-sitemaps-with-wordpress/

Sarah

[ZuraX]

Thanks! I seen the first thread you meantion and that made me really interested in this. Thing is I dont have spreadsheet experience and was scared I would mess something up. :)

[martaay]

my site is an very established one that has no problems being indexed whatsoever, how important would you say it is that we implement sitemaps? I also read somewhere that even googleguy said whether you participated in sitemaps or not it would have no effect on your SERP's!

[minstrel]

If you have an established site that is well-indexed and spidered regularly, I doubt very much that you'll see a noticeable difference by adding a Google Sitemap.

[WebDesignPro]

Is there a free Google SiteMap Generator? One that will let you put in the main URL and it makes the XML file?

I just want to say that Google sitemap.xml.gz files do work.
In 4 days we saw results better than we were able to accomplish for a dynamic content site that hadn't been properly indexed in 1.5 years. Now 10's of thousands of pages are indexed.

The tool that we recommend can be found here:
http://www.web-design-pros.ca/forum/viewforum.php?f=12

We'd appreciate it if you would register to provide us with feedback on it.

It spiders dynamic content (php, jsp, asp)
It filters unwanted pages
It generates a sitemap.xml file
It generates a sitemap.xml.gz file
It can report bad links
It can ftp the file
It can anonymously ping the GoogleBot

[Homie22]

checkout https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&hl=en&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2Fsiteoverview&nui=1