My site's been online since March or so...and Google hadn't indexed more than 50 pages out of about 900. So a few days ago I decided to try a google sitemap, despite some people's horror stories. Today: 890 pages indexed in google! Compared to 50 a few days ago.
Good for you! I think the general consensus of DP members is that Google Sitemaps is a great idea. The bugs or problems some of encountered had more to do with the most recent Google update, in my opinion. I believe you cannot go wrong by using this program.
Wait, now here's the bad news.... My traffic today is the same as when I had 50 pages indexed. Does it take time before google actually delivers the pages in the SERPs?
google seems to be shifting things around a lot this week. Just wait it out a few days and see if your traffic improves.
naturally. just because they are indexed doesn't mean they are now showing up on the first page for a certain search term.
I strongly second what Andre said, besides that it will take a while for you to filter in their engine. Google has a minor spider and a King-Daddy spider... The minor spider will hunt down URLs and scout ahead while the major spider will take it's time and learn everything there is to know about your site. After that, it's up to their system to calculate the data that the big spider found. Then you get rank! All the while, it is doing this with 8,000,000,000 (and more) other pages. While sitemaps are meant to help to speed up getting your site in there, it still depends on a lot of other factors before the big payoff. As far as horror stories, those have been going around about every trick and tool available to help you with Google. At least you don't have less traffic Frankcow, it depends on URLs that are in your sitemap as well as the 'other' settings in your map... chfreq, priority, lastmod. With a blog, you have the power of the ping to help you out Lol @ all the holy crap titles in this footer (similar threads).