Are sitemaps really useful?

I read a few posts about the importance of using the Google sitemap but I'm wondering if this is a way for Google to advertise one of their product or if there is actually real value in using it.

Did anyone test before and after results on this?

 

An absolute necessity. Maps are how people find directions, including the crawlers that visit your site and give you juicy rank

 

Certainly sitemap is very useful. It allows search engines to crawl every page of your website. Moreover, it also help you to increase the PR fast. So you should create sitemap.

 

Also do not forget image and video sitemaps, when we added these to our sites we saw the number of pages crawled reported in webmaster tools increased x 3

 

Sitemap helps to index your site inner pages in search engine. And yes ranking goes up after upload sitemap in google webmaster tools.

 

That's sweet! I will go ahead and create this right away. Thanks a lot for the help guys!

 

How do you go about creating video and image maps? I've never heard about these.

 

Google Webmaster Tools help has a useful guide for creating different sitemaps. You can find it at

support.google.com/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=20986

 

Of-course sitemap is useful for proper crawling your website pages. it navigate bot to index your webpages..

 

If you want faster indexing and wish for the SE's to crawl your site periodically then YES

 

The Sitemap is extremely useful, as it can include information specifying which is the definitive version. This is a better option than leaving the search engines to choose which page to display in their search results, which can prove detrimental. Sitemap files are always placed in the high-level directories of a site, preferably the root folder. It is necessary to update them occasionally, when new pages are added to the site, and when a number of pages are removed for any reason. Each the search engines will require a updated sitemap , so every time the new file will have to be submitted.

 

I've got over a million pages, there's no way I can create a sitemap beyond the index page. I submitted my index page to Google and that's it. But I can tell it's been crawling my site without the sitemap. So has Bing and Yahoo.

 

Google robot can easily see your details.

 

yes sitemap is very necessarily for site promotion in Google

 

I wouldn't say that sitemaps are very necessary, but they help to get your whole website indexed faster. I have some sites that I have never made a sitemap for and Google has found everything in the sites.....just takes a little longer.

 

Bingo! I am on the same page with you on that.

 

yes.. its very useful for us.. if you want to indexing your site... you have to create sitemap.xml...
Pls chk my site sitemap.... http://www.ibazaarindia.com/sitemap.xml

 

sitemap are helpfull to both search engines and users. if you include sitemap in your site then search engines easily crawls your site and users will easily navigate your site links and web pages. XML sitemap is used for search engines and HTML sitemap is used for users.

 

i don`t see why not submitting a sitemap to google or other search engines it can only help...

 

There are tools and plugins to do it for you.