Are sitemaps good or bad?

I find google sitemaps to be quite useful but mainly only to see the sort of search terms and their positions in Google that people can come across my site.

 

I didn't notice any difference in sites that I had done sitemaps for and sites that I didn't do sitemaps. I guess it has only been a few weeks, maybe it is a time related thing?

 

It's great for providing some measure of control on what gets spidered, and how often. However, know what you're doing before making a sitemap, as I mistakenly excluded a whole directory of content (which was major search content) by simply leaving out the directory in the sitemap. Vaporised the whole thing in the Google results.

 

i submitted some sites on sitemaps and my traffic went down about 10 percent so I guess its not that good to give google full control on everything

 

I vote alright because my sites were indexed before I submitted my sitemaps..Even after submitting my sitemaps, some pages are still not index in my SMF forums, rather they are more better indexed in yahoo search...

 

Just now i uploaded my sitemap and saw his tread.
I am still waiting for the good results to come out of them

 

Sitemaps are alright I guess. The ones I've added to my sites so far where just for the visitors, not for search engines. If all of your pages can be reached thru your sites navigation menu I don't think a sitemap will add anything for the search engines.
Using google sitemap to view errors is something that can be very usefull when maintaining large sites. I have not used the google sitemap in this way yet, but will check it out one of these days!

 

hi

the physical sitemap is for user perspective, such that user can navigate the site easily, it may be helful in indexing but not solely.

for indexing purpose google has provided the feature of google sitemap. u can use the feature and can be benefited from it.

 

I think that the idea is really good and is great that it's an open initiative. But, like everything in technology, the use can be right or wrong. If you own a highly dynamic web site, with a heavy server side load and many user input variables, such as query strings, forms and so on, Sitemaps is a fine way to get important parts of your site crawled.

But if you have a small site, with every page as static HTML, like , for example, a Blogger blog, and you have the entire structure of the site at the main navigation bar, perhaps is a useless effort to add an XML site map.

In my opinion, SiteMaps are good. Is the use of it what can be right or wrong.

P.S. My site took two months to be crawled after the inclusion of my log based sitemap

 

very good for me..

 

I use them to help get a site indexed to start with, and update them periodically after that.

 

adding site map in my case result in no new indexed page.

 

Potentially good if they are updated regularly...

 

sitemaps are ok coz they will help in getting ur pages crawled by spiders.. but this has nothing to do with ur ranking is serps..

 

I think sitemaps are good, I have just added a sitemap yesterday in my blog. Though half of the pages of my blog were already indexed in google but I think sitemap will help my new pages getting indexed faster.

 

Franck S: How are sitemaps better for your visitors? Are you thinking of a web page sitemap? This topic is about Google Sitemaps which is a different animal.

 

Sitemap can't help search engines index your site, no does it will help in ranking and pagerank, it just help search engines crawl and organize your site if indexed.

 

It is a very nice way to get a forum indexed the right way!

 

I Uploaded a new site recently,
15 Days and everything is crawled and indexed (and thats with PR0) - cheers for google sitemaps program.

 

How does one go about setting up a sitemap? And by the way what is a sitemap?

Sorry Newbie,