I always wondered whether a sitemap helps out your position in the search engines. Has anyone here recognized a sudden boost in their search engine rankings after including a sitemap to their website?
Yes I have. It will make their index of your site more thoroughly so they don't miss anything and all the pages get indexed. This makes it better for the site because you may get 2 or 3 listings on the serps. I found that I did anyways.
I have the same question... but not exactly if google likes more sites with sitemaps... if google index more pages easily if you have a sitemap or not? thanks
Google indexes your site better if you have sitemaps. It helps with serps, but it has no direct relation with search engine rankings.
you should only use sitemaps when google has not found all of your web pages and you are missing some in the index, though you do need to be patient....
if you have a small site with only few links, then sitemap wont make any difference. but if you have a larger site with lof of categories and subcategories, then having a sitemap will help googlebot crawl all the links and get them indexed quick. thats the whole purpose of sitemap so the SEs can find the links and index the pages.
Sitemaps do NOT boost your serps. They simply make Google aware of all the pages on your site. The more important thing is to have a good internal link structure.
That must be why all 4000+ pages of my website are indexed and kept indexed as they change. I do not use site maps.
the basic idea behind an xml sitemap is to let the robots know about all the pages that are on your website. if your site is small then sitemap hardly makes any difference. but, when you have a big site with lots of pages, then sitemap will tell the robot about all the pages that are to be crawled. if your pages are unique with unique title,meta and content then your site will begin ranking on different keywords according to the algorithm. as far as boost in the search engine rankings is concerned, sitemap has no role to play in it.
sitemap.xml is give you benefit of fast indexing and static sitemap give benefits of proper internal pages linking
Yes as all said sitemap is one of the good way for index your all pages and one more advantage is it helps to your visitors to find the exact quarries which they are looking
I believe sitemap is just for intimation of the search engine to include the links which are available in your site... but it will not boost up your SERPs.
me not sutre.. mi site indexing after submiting sitemap same as befor submit....I thing its good for new sites...
Sitemap doesn't serve a direct benefit in SERP..however, better indexing of your website could help your website to get ranked on search engines..
The only thing a sitemap helps with is the spiders to find all your pages. It is no magic formula to get better rankings. I might however help you to keep some deep pages indexed.
it's good to have sitemap for your site,but from my experience I have to tell you that I have sites with a better ranking in search engine without sitemaps.
Yes.. You are right !!! My 6 sites have got a BOOST when sitemap is on!! One of my website sitemap got missed when changing host.. So all my top ranking pages disappeared.. When i included the sitemap, all the pages came to the same position once again!! From my exp its definitely a boost !! But I really dont understand why Google has done this !!
Sitemaps have ZERO effect on your rankings in the SERPs. There is no such thing as a ranking factor called "Has Sitemap" which Google figures into their ranking algorithm which would boost your rankings if it is true. There are three basic purposes of a sitemap: 1) Submitting a sitemap can be used by new web sites with no backlinks to notify Google and other enginess that the site exists. So it's a site discovery tool. But this is really not necessary (or preferable IMO). The search engines have been discovering new sites for more than a decade by following inbound links to the new site from other sites that are already indexed. So the same thing can be achieved by getting an inbound link or two and waiting for the crawlers to find them. 2) The sitemap lets the search engines know which URLs are available on your site to be crawled. As sultanofseo stated, if you have a small site then having a sitemap is going to do absolutely nothing. But with large ecommerce sites, forums, etc. that have hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs, it can be a big help in getting more of your site indexed... However, if your site has a good information architecture with a very good interlinking structure between your pages, a sitemap may not be necessary. But I would always recommend one for any site with more than a few thousand pages. 3) The sitemap is a webmaster's tool for prioritizing which pages he/she wants indexed first. IMO this is the most important function of a sitemap, especially for very large sites. The search engines typically don't index every page of a huge ecommerce site or forum. So rather than leave it to chance, a sitemap allows the webmaster so tell the search engines, "If you're not going to index my entire site then I would like you to index THESE pages as a first priority. Then if you are willing to index more, these are the second priority. Then if you are willing to index more, these are the third priority. etc." Unfortunately a lot of people don't realize that the prioritization of the URLs is probably the most important feature. Many will have every URL in their sitemap using the same priority. Again, almost the same effect can be achieved by having a good information architecture and interlinking structure between pages on your site. Unfortunately huge ecommerce sites are not known for have a good information architectures... so it's always a good idea for large sites to have one.
well i use many methods at a time to increase my ranking so i'm not sure if the result really comes from the sitemap sorry if this doesn't help