Are Google SiteMaps Dead?

It's a lot of extra hassle and I have seen no benefit whatsoever!
I would sure appreciate your opinions.
Thanks
Doug

 

for me it works fine. my new pages are being indexed quickly

 

Well it **used** to work for me too. Google has completely ignored them for two of my sites for at least the last month or so.

 

It will let you know if you have something that Google considers "problem" although it won't specifically let you know what that problem may be.

Dave

 

They are el crapo

You dont need a google sitemap just build your own. Much less work anyway and does the same thing. No benefit to google sitemap. And it wont really help you get indexed at all...thats a big myth.

 

After what I've heard, I'm afraid to try it. Some people at WMW forums are finding many pages being de-indexed after submitting a sitemap. Some commonalities were that they added a base tag to their pages and some did 301 redirects from non-www to www. The base tag seemed to be the biggest commonality.

 

That's quite odd. One of my websites where I use Google sitemaps has very regular visits from Googlebot and search results bringing people to my website shows that the entre point for some are some of the newer pages of my website.

 

I submitted 3 of my sites to sitemaps and none of them are close to having the right amount of pages in the index. Rankings are ok and I don't want to mess with anything.

 

I've lost many pages lately also after including sitemaps. I'm not really sure this is as good of a thing as google makes it out to be. Took the time to fix sitemaps on several forums and now It doesn't index as well.

 

Just within the last week virtually all of my pages have been indexed, in my opinion Sitemaps is working better now that it used to. That being said, I originally submitted to Google Sitemaps at the beginning or March and it just now seems to be having a substantial effect.

 

I've heard of quite a few problems with Sitemaps too, it seems it's only worth signing up for if you've got a new site that your struggling to get indexed.

 

I have tried it for the last few months, and haven't seen it help get pages indexed quicker.

The good thing I like about it is that it tells me what pages have 404 errors.
A lot of pages that I removed over a year ago were still being found by google.

 

I don't use it. I was also wondering whether or not it was worth the effort. Based on what I've read here, I don't think that i will be doing this anytime soon.

 

I've seen no benefits either. I don't know if I'm going to bother to update the damn things anymore.

I don't THINK they are having a negative impact but given that they aren't helping even the remote possibility suggests to me it might be a good idea to dump them.

 

I think it can help, but only if you have the PR in the first place.

Mines all automated anyway so its not like its hard to update.

 

I used to use Sitemaps until my trust in Google and general feeling about them plumetted.

Since Google don't seem to know what the heck is going on (I'll be suprised if anyone at Google actually has a full picture of their Search engine, indexing, Sitemaps and how it all works together), who'se to say having Sitemaps can't, won't or doesn't have the potential to harm our sites.

I'm sick of it. I dumped mine last week and I won't be using them again.

Pete

 

The sitemaps tool is useful to get some information on how G sees your site. I dont submit a sitemap anymore - just add the URL into G site maps. Now whenever I build a new site I add it in just for the hell of it. Doesnt seem to get the site indexed faster or anything. These days so fast to get a new site indexed anyway - its getting it to the top thats the hard part. Curse you google, curse you!

 

Any issues that there currenly are seem to be related to Google indexing problems rather than sitemaps. I'd persist with it and hope that any issues iron themselves out once Google sort out thir indexing problems.

 

Sitemaps in general are overrated. Not just google ones.

 

I tried the Google sitemaps with several sites months ago and had bad results. I think they are crap.

I don't really see the point to them. If you have a good sitemap and design on your website then any bot or spider which comes along will find your sitemap and in return find your pages. No need to make a special sitemap for Google and then Yahoo, etc...