The title of this post states my theory. What do you think? Here is how I arrived at this conclusion: I have a blog and I uploaded its sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. However, I uploaded the sitemap a few weeks ago, and the blog has many new pages/posts since then, so the sitemap on Google Webmaster Tools is out of date. If Google uses the sitemap I uploaded to Google Webmaster Tools, Google will be using the out-of-date sitemap. However, if I don't upload the sitemap.xml to Google Webmaster Tools, Google will be forced to pull the fresh/current sitemap from my www.domain.com/sitemap.xml file. Thus, it seems that if I want Google to find the most current sitemap.xml, I should not upload it to Google Webmaster Tools. What do you think? Does this logic make sense or am I missing something?
that makes sense to me isn't google being lazy by wanting sitemaps? I mean, it makes sense for big static sites that might have a lot of duplicated content but for forums and blogs it makes no sense to me
I have a site that gets about 200 articles submissions per day. So I try to update my sitemap daily and get it uploaded. I suppose I could use the Google Webmaster Tools But it would be just another chore.
Regardless what is displayed in your sitemap GoogleBot will still crawl your entire site. The submit sitemap gives it the structure layout but rest assure it will find your other pages not included in your sitemap. Once you have a mature site that contains backlinks you don't really need to submit a sitemap anymore, I still do for arguements sake.
google automatically re downloads your sitemaps every so often im pretty sure, so just keep it updated and you shouldnt have a problem (in webmaster tools i mean)
I still submit my sitemap everytime I update for arguement sake, it doesn't take long to rebuild it and takes seconds to re-submit, the time it costs vs the possible results is totally worth it.
You are correct. Google Webmaster Tools will pull a new version of the sitemap you have on your site every few days so it crawls the latest copy. In other words, it doesn't hurt to tell Google Webmaster Tools that you have a sitemap. By the way, if your sitemap is not named "sitemap.xml" or a similar typical sitemap name that Google spiders would look for, then telling Google Webmaster Tools the name and location of your sitemap is especially important.
IMHO, you can actually... google will still crawl your site without the sitemap as long as you have a good linking structure... I have a couple of "non-sitemap" websites and every now and then, google recrawls them...
Yes.. google will spider just about anything ... but I would post up a robot.txt on your root to help the spiders do it correctly. Pretty simple you could just do * / Allow All if you want all indexed.. not saying it will..but it could.
I have a site that gets about 200 articles submissions per day. So I try to update my sitemap daily and get it uploaded I still submit my sitemap everytime I update for arguement sake
Some of the sitemap service out there will enable you to auto-submitting your site into Google. Maybe you could give it a try for a heavily-updated sites..