I know that you can get your site indexed faster, but are there any other major benefits in using it? What do you use it for?
After I listed a few of my sites with google sitemaps... the number of pages indexed actually went down. So... yeah. Be careful.
Even if you don't submit a sitemap it's still worth signing up for a sitemaps account and verifying your site just for the stats they provide you with and alerts for any problems they might find with your site.
Someone posted a link on another forum to a discussion (or rather a full blown arguement) saying that Google site maps ruined a sites rankings. Apparently the guy who used sitemaps had his site practically drop off the face of the earth and the only thing he had changed was using sitemaps. Very strange but its made me weary now.
I found it useful for some top keyword stats. As for helping get indexed I don't think it matters too much.
To check crawl stats (real-time PR range, distribution) and keyword frequency from external links. Status of the last scan, page not found errors are other things I check. All around, sitemaps provide some feedback of how googlebot is accessing, evaluating your site.
Becareful about the position of your sitemap on page. Moreover, in the sitemap, page content need to be handled carefully to avoid content spamming as sitemap always duplicated some keywords.
Everything is back to normal on my part, the query data used to get to my site was even updated, so now this service is even more sweet than ever before, loving it.
See my post here on this topic: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=1349530&postcount=18 Google sitemaps not good for SEO?? (View Single Post)