Google Sitemaps question

Is there any negative aspect to Google Sitemaps? How will it benifit my site, any feedback on sitemaps would be great. Thanks in advance

John

 

I had over 45,000 pages indexed in google. After submitting the sitemap to google I have now 173 pages indexed. Cool.... isn't it?

 

@syncmaster, you are being sarcastic, right?

 

The two aren't necessarily related though. I'm of the opinion that it's pretty pointless if you're already well indexed. If you haven't been indexed too well (this applies to forums most of all) then it's an excellent tool and has added tens of thousands of pages to my sites that were too deep to be found before.

It's a good tool but I think the amount you're going to get out of it depends considerably on your site type and how well you were indexed before.

 

I submitted a sitemap a couple months ago. I only have a small percentage of pages indexed so nothing to loose, but the sitemap has done nothing to increase the number in indexed pages.

 

I suspect your decrease in listings may be tied to other events that others are experiencing. Biggest benefit is quicker listing of new content, i've had content in the search engine within the day from using sitemaps. Downside is its more work i guess unless you automate it.

 

I have a new webpage, when I submitted a sitemap it was indexed the next day, coincidence?

 

No, not a coincidence.... It was quite unexpected for my new site having less than 1500 pages(confirmed) but u know what google did? I got 12,000 pages indexed for that website when i submitted sitemap. Now WTF?

 

I have lost pages since having a site map. Thought it was going to help

 

Hello everyone,
I am new here and do see alot of questions about search engines and so on.
Just to let you guys know, just finished my last paper work for my research so free to answer anything you like related to the topics.
I am a PH.D. student, and my research is based on search engines and working on one right now, hopefully would be done by next year(2007).
I will discuss things to do and not to do with google sitemap, and its benefits and damages that it can cause you or should I say your site.
I will start short points since noone wants to read a book and more info would be available on my site, so you are more then welcome to share it, use it and do what as you wish.

Thank you

 

My site can out from google sandbox easy within 3 month.

 

Google sitemap is the best way to index your new pages in google.

 

for a new site yes, but for an old site, google would drop alot of your pages if it is not in the sitemap and good luck creating a sitemap for 200,000 articles. most people use php and jsp for big sites and mysql as database. so you have to make a script to automate the sitemap.

 

I've only just over 200 pages - new site recently deep indexed started earning money - added site map - dropped out index - stopped earning money.

Totally frustrated with Google and their site maps - if you look at googles site map page Quote "Potential indexing problems:

Some of your pages are partially indexed. [?]

We do not know about all the pages of your site. Submit a Sitemap to tell us more about your site."

Why is this not true?

 

please do keep in mind, that google has a big algorithm, and I just posted something about how the PR work and how they rank you. So if you are a new site google does not really trust you for many reasons. Which I explained also before.
So tell us your PR and site name, I sure would take a look at your site and your sitemap to point the problems and then see the change.

Thank you

 

I am just trying to find out if my host can handle python script (apparently required for Google sitemaps)? Just sent them an email coz I would not have a clue!! Awaiting their reply. Any comments on this??

 

Well, I've unfortunately added my sites to Google Sitemaps before reading this thread. Now I see that it wasn't at all unnecessary, because my sites are indexed very well (and all the pages on all the six variants of my site)


So I am curious, if I've added that "<meta name="verify-v1" content="some_random_string=" />" tag and verified the sites in question, but didn't create that "sitemap.xml" file, what is the "status" of my sites from the Google Sitemaps' perspective ??


tayiper

 

You can use a vast amount of tools for generating sitemaps.

Personally I recommend
A1 Sitemap Generator - but that is perhaps because I made it

Other tools can be found here:
http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

 

The only negative aspect I can think of is that as an SEO you probably dont want to let the Search Engines know what you are doing. You want to make it hard for them to find out what you are doing.

The only incentive currently is that they might warn you if you are not following their guidlines which is nice so you are not banned right away.

You need to way the good with the bad.

If you have time I talk more about this at