I was wondering, You hear so much about how good it is to have a sitemap and hows its good for seo to submit it to Google. I wanted to know what the downside to this is. What are the disadvantages and how it can limit a site. any views??
I can't say that it would have negatives. You're basically providing a list of your content that you want them to spider.
Yea, i agree but do you think you are restricting google to just those urls when they can spider alot more or pay attention some of the more important ones which the users are searching for and you don't know about??
Sitemap just makes the bots find your pages easier. The only downside I can think of is having to remember to update them when you change your content.
Yes, i agree that its got a lot of good things that come with it but everything has some bad impact with it. For instance like pointed our above. Could it possible restrict the more important posts and promote the ones which are not as important to users. For instance. Lets leave the indexing scenario aside. Lets assume that regardless of submitting the site map to google you get indexed quickly (which most large sites do) what other impacts could this have for a website. Maybe im being to vague here but i feel that there has to be a negative impact as well.
I don't think there is a downside to it. Google is not going to only crawl the pages you have in your Sitemap or not re-index/update your pages not in there rather than ones that are. The point of a Sitemap is to inform Google of all the pages you have in a site so it makes sure it indexes them. If you don't list a page then it's not going to matter it will only help you if you do list it as Google will know for sure that paged needs indexed. The only downside I can even think of is if you where to set a web page's priority to like 0 or something where some other page was at 1.0 But the worst that would come from that would be the page set to 1.0 would come up in the search results before the page with the 0 priority.
If you want to give some pages of your site more importance then you can link them more. even from your own website's index page.
I agree. Having a sitemap with Google doesn't hurt. For me, it is helpful because I submitted my sitemaps by category, I can tell which of them are getting indexed faster or at least if any of them are getting indexed at all.
I've never heard of a SiteMap doing any harm. All it does is it makes it easier for bots and/or your visitors better navigate through your great content Easier navigation can never be a bad thing
See it this way: Google is thankful you help their spiders reaching your site by submitting your list of URLs.
the only disadvantage in G sitemaps (from what I know) is if your sitemap is done automatically and you did not restrict your script to not include your admin pages, so your sitemap actually lists the URLs to the administrative pages... Other than this there is none...
Having a sitemap gives you the added advantage of having a keyword dense page. one technique I saw was to put thumbnail pictures of your web pages and label them with appropriate key words.
As they said here before, only one disadvantage of using any sitemap is that you need to update it when you have new content. I do believe that it helps your site indexed quicker
Same reply as IAMJos3 adding that if you have alot of webpages, in the 1000's, that it will generally be heavier on resources while generating and take a while to re-populate a sitemap file. On the other hand this is just a fraction of time if you were to let the bots spider all the content organically.