Is sitemap even needed?

When I first start out the site, I thought sitemap is very important to get most of my page index. After I got the index going, I don't even have to update my site map and google bot still crawl my site and get all the links. Even the link I haven't post up yet somehow they managed to crawl that page and index it.

So I was wondering if sitemap is really needed?

 

you must keep your sitemap up to date. if you are not going to do this , sitemap may hurt your serp

 

It is not needed but it does help if google bot has problems navigating your internal link structure. If you have a menu with links to all your internal pages on your main page, it shouldn't be a problem but if the menu on you main page links to the landing page for different subsections in your site like my main page does, a sitemap would help a lot.

 

your sitemap helps googlebot craw your sites easier.
without sitemap you may wait for googlebot to craw after it found links to you in other sites.
do not for get to update your sitemap after you add pages on your site.

 

If nothing else, it will help search engines find /all/ your pages, quicker (!)

 

Probably not "needed", but certainly helpful.

• Your .html sitemap page helps your visitors find pages easily.

• Your .xml sitemap, created by one of the many online sitemap generator websites, helps Google find your new pages easily. Plus, in your free Google Webmaster Tools account (all should get one), you can resubmit your updated sitemap.xml to let Google know you have new pages. My experience is that resubmitting the .xml sitemap leads very soon to a Google crawl of that sitemap.

 

It is helpful as Googlebots use 'em. The whole purpose is to keep your site high up, cos lets face it no one looks past the first page of a search engine

 

You don't need it once google indexed your pages!

 

You DO need it when your site gets big. Let's say you have a teensy 5-page site. Four of the pages are linked from the index page. Google crawls index, sees the links for the others...and finds your whole site.

One year later: you've been blogging like a madman, and now have 10,000 pages. Not all of them are referenced from the index page of course. Many of them are linked from other internal pages, and many of them are thus hard for Google to find.

What to do? Well, in order for Googlebot to make sweet love to your site you need to make it easy. A sitemap is a perfect solution: "Googlebot, please go here and here and here and here."

However you'll soon notice Googlebot ain't finding the pages lower down in your sitemap...what to do? Split the sitemap into two files. Submit each one separately. You'll soon find that a larger percentage of your internal pages have been crawled...

Thank me anytime.

 

I know many people who not update sitemap and their indexing rates.

 

The site map does not need to be updated to really affect it much if you have certain key pages in it.

 

If your website has more than 3 level pages -- domain.com/level1/level2/.....
then sitemap is a must. Otherwise google will only index your home page and level 1 pages.

 

Now, that is what I was looking for..
Thank you.

 

It won't hurt to add a sitemap

 

When you make a site map also sign up with google's webmaster tools.

I have noticed a big difference after submitting a site map with them so I recommend it.

 

A Google sitemap is not something to be extremely necessary for a successful web page getting indexed quickly, you can find so many websites, especially some older domain names being at good shape without the sitemap and yet at the top of rankings, but since it relatively is a new system, webmasters are advised to use that as many success stories are reported in indexing hard to find pages by Google.

 

u should update your sitemap periodically, better for ur seo

 

Hi,

I made "http://www.example.com/sitemap.html" webpage with links of all the pages of my website and then made sitemap.xml of that webpage and submit to google sitemaps. Is it the right way to make sitemap. Or I have to enter all the urls of my website in .xml format. Thanx

 

This isn't true if your pagerank is 4 and up. The higher your page rank - the deeper you'll get indexed.

Also depends on hour your site is structured. If your level 2 links are only on the first page - you might have trouble - but if they are sitewide - you shouldn't have any trouble having 3rd level pages indexed. If you go deeper you should try to have all 4th level links point back to their perspective third level links. They will be given more importance than sitewides within the pages of that level.

 

The original reason for having sitemaps was to help robots find their way around a site, which they might not manage if you have a lot of Flash or use JavaScript menus. A sitemap might also reduce the resources used by a crawler that would otherwise need to crawl a database driven site to find all the pages. If you have a small-ish site and all the pages are readily found from the index page or a level or two below it, I don't see that a sitemap is necessary. Nor can I see the benefit of a Google xml sitemap over a list of URLs which is what other search engines want anyway.

There are facilities in the Google xml format to specify how often you want the robots to visit and what priority the pages should be given, but Google says that it only treats these as "hints", otherwise everyone would say their pages should have top priority and be checked every five minutes. So I wonder if it takes much notice of these values at all.

As others have said, it's the site page rank that has the greatest impact on how often the crawlers visit. And a sitemap isn't going to help with that.