How useful are the sitemaps

I haven't begin using sitemaps yet, I don't think I will need one. However.. how useful are the sitemaps?

 

Do you have problems with GG indexing your site? That's the question. If not, don't worry about it.

 

I have found sitemaps work for me. It's quick and simple to produce a sitemap so I would recommend you have a go at it.

 

Sitemaps only work if you have an "established" webiste to the eyes of google. For example if you have a PR4 or up, you're going to get indexed fast just after the first few crawls. But if you have a new site that does not have good links pointing back to it yet, it's totally useless.

 

Donno about that. My brand new site's indexed pages in Google jumped up from 30 to 600 within 48 hours of adding a sitemap.

But on the flip side, after 2 months and PR of 4, indexed pages are still at 900

 

There has certainly been other factors that has been involved for the indexing of this site. My 'definition" of established here is not based on a time frame, but rather on a standboard that it meets all the "requirements" for google to crawl and index it. A few days old site too can get indexed if the favorable conditions are met.

 

i've had a full map for a month now, but not indexed yet by google

edit: and it's a new site

 

As I mentioned elsewhere, it's interesting to see the number of other bots that have shown up since adding a sitemap. Even if it doesn't change things for G you may get the benefit of being index by other SEs

 

I've seen a site stuck at 40-60k indexed pages go to 260k+ indexed pages just implementing a quality sitemap and submitting to Google

Excellent for ecommerce sites, and probably content sites (articles, forums etc) with legacy content and brand new content side by side -

Also I've seen it REALLY help PR and serps on some pages that were previously buried beneath 5-6 levels of navigation

 

I have a datafeed site that is 4 levels deep and never got more than 80K pages in their index. After using the sitemap, 400K was indexed in less than 3 weeks and a marked increase in googlebot activity. This is where the sitemap is useful - on deep pages that has difficulty getting indexed. Certainly there will also be an internal PR gain if that much pages are getting indexed.

 

I found myself looking into the google site map generater a few weeks ago and it seemed like a lot of work to get it set up....there was a large config file to read and modify. Is this the way to do it? with the google sitemap generator? or is there an easier way

My site was indexed by G within 5 days and the Gbot seems to return every few days and seems to grab many MB's of data every time....think its up to something like 250MB for this month!! But my site is not doing too well in G with related/specific keywords though. I really have to type in my whole domain name to get my site out of G.

So, is a site map usefull in my case? (my site is 4 weeks old)

cheers

 

I too am considering the use of Google Sitemaps. I have a few questions that I was hoping someone might be able to answer:

1. I have recently finished a redesign, so basically the bulk of my sitemap has changed. Now, I want Google to transfer my PR and rankings for these pages. So, I want Google to come back and figure out these have changed. Now, if I submit a Google Sitemap, will Google think these are "new" pages that it hasn't found before? I'm not sure?
2. I have a subdomain (ecommerce site) that is hosted in a different location from my site. When I set up my Google sitemap, do I include the subdomain? Will the software solutions that generate the sitemap include the subdomain?

Thanks in advance.
Chris

p.s. - FWIW, I was considering using the PHP XML Sitemap Generator

 

Do date, I haven't found them very useful and I've encountered more than a few people who screwed up their Google referrer goldmine try to use it. Right now, Sitemaps is beta and has a lot of bugs. Unless it's your job to know how it works or you're positive you know what you are doing, then I'd avoid it.

 

Or if your site is brand new and large, it likely won't hurt. It seemed to help for one of mine.

 

I have atleast 200 pages indexed per day on my site which have PR 0 now. Should I use google sitemap?

 

If you have a good linking structure in your site and all pages are only 2-3 levels deep then it won't make any difference. By the time i'm finished typing this, googlebot already has a good idea of all the pages on your site (if you say you get 200 pages/day I-N-D-E-X-E-D)

 

I was getting about the same thing; 200 pages per update on a new PR0. I added a sitemap and on the next update it went from 360 pages cached to 24,000.

 

Google sitemaps is really good tho.

Before i sumbit my forum sitemap to google sitemaps. My forums page indexed just like 110+ but now after i submit it, 14000 pages & counting on are indexed

Yahoo & Msn also increased from 1000+ to 7000+.

 

I'm hosting over 125 small to medium sites. We use the Google site map all the time. The error information helps with navigation errors, etc. but we noticed right from the start that Google, Yahoo and MSN indexed much deeper.

As for shopping carts or database driven sites, it is the only way to get the deep index you need. We just create a TXT file of the dynamic links and the SE read them. What is even better, they show up.

Example: http://www.catanich.com/HPpartmap.txt

Jim Catanich
www.catanich.com