Does Google Sitemap help with indexing new sites

[spondishy]

That's it really.

If I add a sitemap, is Google likely to do deep-crawling quicker?

[simplexity]

I should hope so. I would have thought it definately increases the chances of google deep-crawling your entire site but i am not sure wheather it would increase the frequency of crawls.

[aeiouy]

I haven't seen anything to support this one way or another. Currently all my sites have sitemaps listed with google, but I have not seen any kind of relationship between that and getting indexed or deep-crawled.

[webbom]

Some of my sites have sitemaps and others don't. I really don't see any diference. What really makes your site get indexed quick and deep is having good links to it.

[webstop]

I used to try to add a sitemaps to a new sub domain without any links to it. After two weeks still haven't appear in google index.

[DaveN]

leave it 3 - 4 weeks you should see a deep crawl after that

DaveN

[Ethiccash]

If you have a new site, indexation will depend on incoming links. Sitemap won't do anything to be spidered. But sitemap, will help once you're on the index to show Google that your site has content (relevant and related to keywords)

[Worldwid]

I have not seen any difference with using the sitemap.

That said, I still use it as it doesnt take long to setup.

[mihnea007]

Google Sitemap has not helped me in any way

[aeiouy]

By the way, as I noted in another thread, the sitemap has some new stats that are useful regardless of if it helps with getting indexed, because it will list errors and problems with indexing pages in your site maps and will also list errors you got outside of the sitemap and just by google crawling on its own.

[toocoolforschool]

It's still relatively new, so I guess no one can really tell just yet. But just in case it does, why don't you submit one anyway? It's not like it'll take more than a few minutes.

[Jan]

By the way, as I noted in another thread, the sitemap has some new stats.....
From what I've seen so far, the term "error log" would be more appropriate than "stats".

[boohlick]

It's still relatively new, so I guess no one can really tell just yet. But just in case it does, why don't you submit one anyway? It's not like it'll take more than a few minutes.

Google admits that there is no assurance that your site can be indexed even if you submit it to google ste map.... It all depends on your off page optimization :)

[Crusader]

Well, I've seen Google index all my pages after uploading a sitemap. Just too bad that my site has dissappeared from search results due to me changing the domain. Looks like I killed my site. :(

[wizardofx]

The crazy thing is that the sitemap group can't
seem to get together with the froogle group.
With froogle you can do everything with a
spreadsheet, but with sitemap you have to use
xml to get all the features. Yet the information
passed is no more complicated with sitemap
than with froogle.

[wizardofx]

Google admits that there is no assurance that your site can be indexed even if you submit it to google ste map.... It all depends on your off page optimization :)

This is the post that I was looking for. Google actually
says that putting up a sitemap won't affect your
search results. But then as an optimist I figure if
I go through all that work, they will appreciate it
and treat me like a human being for a change:)

[spondishy]

As an update, I got a deep crawl after about a week without the sitemap...

[Enigma121]

A sitemap has the adantage that you can notify google of changes to your site, and expect a crawl quickly in return to keep your listing up to date. Sounds fair enough to me.

[sparkimarki]

From my experiece, using the sitemap does help to get indexed quicker - why would they offer this otherwise. In any case, it can do no harm.

[king_cobra]

i have just started with gsitemap. they started this as something that will help them reduce their autmoatic bot's workload. when we consider that the sites which use gsitemap forms not even .00001% of all the websites, this wont do much good to google. but still they can atleast schedule their crawlers on the serious websites (of serious webmasters ;) ). anyway its still beta and we will start seeing the advantage sooner than later.

[baltozar]

i found that adding a sitemap has gotten 1 of my client sites. indexed, fully. it does work

[Sarangan]

I think google sitemap system is only to tell google about all our pages. It doesn`t affect any crawling frequencies..

[Sarangan]

Google sitemap system is only to tell google about all the pages we have.. It doesn`t affect any crawling frequecy or times..

[eliasmoosa]

Experts needed here pls :)

1-If I have a site that has a site map to all its folders under that domain and I have choosen some of these folders as subdomains , I know thos subdomain folders are alreadu included in the general site map of the site ,BUT, should I cresat a dedicated site map for each sub domain folder by it self , in another word , is it better ?

2-If I created that dedicated site map to that folder that is a sub domain , so now the pages for that folder has a dedicated site map witihn the subdomain folder and it is also idexed in the site map of the main general site map of the site as all , would that cause any conflict or a loop and delay for the search engine to read the same page again (twice insted of once) because they are in the two site maps ?
Thanks

[Sarangan]

Does Google Sitemap help with indexing new sites?

No it doesn`t. It takes the normal time to get crawled.

[softplus]

elias: 1) you need separate sitemap files, 2) no problem.

Google sitemaps does not change initial indexing of a site. NO CHANGE. Why should it? All the usual rules still apply (note: in the 3-4 weeks of Google Sitemaps it was different).

If you have a small site and Google can't index it properly it's either because you don't have enough value (PR, etc) or your site is miserably linked internally (eg asp.net post-based links, javascript, etc.). In these cases (for small sites) a Google Sitemap file will help, but fixing your site will work much better (and for all engines, imagine that).

For larger sites (say >1k URLs) Google sitemaps will help to crawl optimally (speed / frequency + URL choice).

Keeping an old Google Sitemap file on a server with dynamic content won't help much though :D

[MikeSwede]

I submitted some site maps for some of my sites and that was the wrost thing I could do. Now I know that there are some out there that doesn't agree with me, but as soon as I submitted my site maps my rankings dropped and one site disappeared totally and has never made it back. As soon as I realized that there might be a problem with submitting sitemaps I removed them and has slowly started go get better ranking again in the SERP's.
Google says a lot and one of the things is, like a lot of people like to repeat like a mantra, that it is good for you to have a site map, deep crawl and all that but for me it has been the opposite, so I have removed all my site maps.
If Google want pages in their index so they can make money from it, let them work for it just like we have to do.
Sometime in my bad moments with Google, I compare them to a scraper site that they monetize, but I guess.... it's nothing we can do....

[Crusader]

I submitted some site maps for some of my sites and that was the wrost thing I could do. Now I know that there are some out there that doesn't agree with me, but as soon as I submitted my site maps my rankings dropped and one site disappeared totally and has never made it back. As soon as I realized that there might be a problem with submitting sitemaps I removed them and has slowly started go get better ranking again in the SERP's.
Google says a lot and one of the things is, like a lot of people like to repeat like a mantra, that it is good for you to have a site map, deep crawl and all that but for me it has been the opposite, so I have removed all my site maps.
If Google want pages in their index so they can make money from it, let them work for it just like we have to do.
Sometime in my bad moments with Google, I compare them to a scraper site that they monetize, but I guess.... it's nothing we can do....

I highly doubt that submitting a sitemap was the cause for your drop in rankings. It's much more likely that it was just the normal changes and updates to the Google datacenters. Saying that sitemaps caused it is just too great a leap to me.

[seoocean]

Kindly look at the google sitemaps - supported formats.
A sitemap in XML format seems to be the best option for google, text format for yahoo works best !!

hope this helps everyone !

[daithanh]

still no helping