I have a website of about 50k and need to generate a sitemap. Are any of online ones good or should I download one instead? How much traffic do sitemap generators create?
I like this one and use it frequently — http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ I think this free one will generate a sitemap.xml of up to 500 pages. The sitemap.xml in and of itself is not the traffic generator. What it does is help the search engines to crawl your site completely and not miss indexing pages. That gets your pages into the search indexes. And that will put you in a position to rise in the SERPs and get traffic.
Thanks for the tip. I'm trying a few ones that are downloadable. If they don't work out, then maybe I'll register with xml-sitemaps. 500 pages is useful, but not quite enough. And right now, google isn't indexing a good portion of the site.
Google seems to take its own sweet time indexing. Every time I add a new page, I generate and upload a new sitemap.xml and "resubmit" it in my Google Webmaster Tools and in Yahoo Site Explorer. Despite that, some new pages seem to take a week or two getting indexed, but sooner or later they all do. If you are in a bigger hurry to get new, inner pages indexed, here are two suggestions: 1) You can use your four DP signature links to list those new pages until they are indexed. 2) You can put a link to your new inner pages on your home page and keep the link there until the new pages are indexed (usually fairly quickly).
http://sitemap.peterz.info/home.php does up to 2000 pages. Aber, mann muss Deutsch lesen. I like your idea of having new links on a loading page that google can find easily.