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Sitemaps are useless

Discussion in 'Google Sitemaps' started by Torafox, Jul 29, 2011.

  1. instinctis

    instinctis Active Member

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    #21
    Sitemap helps only when one's site has more than 10k pages, meaning that it helps the spiders to keep track of the new content. Other than this the sitemap has no effect at all.
    By having more and more pages without any sitemap at all will cause the spider to index less and less pages day by day until a full stop will be met.
     
    instinctis, Jan 8, 2012 IP
  2. Sebastian Rockefeller

    Sebastian Rockefeller Greenhorn

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    #22
    Sitemaps are NOT useless, read google webmaster docs
     
    Sebastian Rockefeller, Jan 9, 2012 IP
  3. jlaurier

    jlaurier Greenhorn

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    #23
    Webmasters, If you want to see how negative sitemaps are. Go to webmaster tools after launching a brand new website, submit your sitemap and check the indexing of the pages and images in your sitemap. You will see it will take several weeks. I have the same feeling that Torafox. I think that sitemap adds indexing cycles and slow down the real pages indexing. Sitemap indexing does not mean google indexing. Sitemap does not speed up crawling.
     
    jlaurier, Jun 20, 2012 IP
  4. ashersmith

    ashersmith Peon

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    #24
    Sitemap is compulsory for a website. :)
     
    ashersmith, Jun 22, 2012 IP
  5. jlaurier

    jlaurier Greenhorn

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    #25
    Here are my points against XML sitemaps:

    1. They are indexed and appear in search results. If you have 4 sitemaps (post,page,image,news), you are going to get 5 additional snippets with meaningless smippet description.

    2. Googlebot crawls xml files. Sitemap xml files are considered as any other xml files. Consequently, you have a new file with not valuable content in it. I am wondering if we lose google juice because of sitemap.xml

    3. In webmaster tools, after submitting an XML sitemap, you see the submitted pages and images versus the number of indexed pages and images. Wait several days, you will see the sitemap does not speed up indexing on the chart. (you get the chart by clicking on the number of submitted pages)

    4. I had a forum in which i installed Phpbb SEO. This module created new urls for each topic using the title of the topic as an URL. Nevertheless, i installed it partially and i had two URLs for one page (ex:viewforum.php?f=123 and /my-title-here) I also had a auto generated sitemap with URL like /my-title-here. So i thought the sitemap will be used as a base for indexing my website. I thought sitemap indicated google which page to index.
    So i thought googlebot will pick up the descriptive URL like /my-tiltle-here rather than viewforum.php?f=123
    I was wrong, googlebot indexed both URL for each page. What a mess !! (by the way i fixed it with redirect 301)

    SITEMAP = USELESS !
     
    jlaurier, Jul 16, 2012 IP
  6. Saif Rizvi

    Saif Rizvi Member

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    #26
    Basically sitemap are used when you have lots of pages for website and there are interlinking between them. You need to specify each url in different category. Sitemaps are very beneficial from the point of googl
     
    Saif Rizvi, Jul 17, 2012 IP
  7. semwinner

    semwinner Peon

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    #27
    I can't agree with you, sitemap of course is useful for sites. Maybe for some small sites with little pages and do not need to update very often, sitemap is relatively not necessary. But for new sites, sites with many pages, and sites need to update frequently, sitemap is highly needed. Since we need to like search engine know a new index is needed, and a quick and complete index is needed. all those can be done by sitemap.
     
    semwinner, Jul 18, 2012 IP
  8. cph

    cph Peon

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    #28
    Google guide line for SEO said you should have xml sitemap for a site
     
    cph, Jul 25, 2012 IP
  9. Andres Solutions

    Andres Solutions Member

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    #29
    Sitemaps and not useless. Google said that A webmaster show have sitemap on his site.
    So for this reason only, if not for others, they are not useless
     
    Andres Solutions, Jul 25, 2012 IP
  10. Bagtjesen

    Bagtjesen Greenhorn

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    #30
    Sitemap is very necessary or a site
     
    Bagtjesen, Jul 25, 2012 IP
  11. cristinascabbia

    cristinascabbia Peon

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    #31
    Thanks for valuable information.
     
    cristinascabbia, Jul 25, 2012 IP
  12. Cool Blogger

    Cool Blogger Member

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    #32
    As you know sitemaps using manyresource on your hosting. Be wise using your sitemap.
     
    Cool Blogger, Jul 25, 2012 IP
  13. CafaMagician80

    CafaMagician80 Active Member

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    #33
    If you got two identical websites, one with a sitemap, one without a sitemap, the results will be the same.

    But sitemap doesn't hurt, it can be helpful in certain real-life scenarios. For example, it can correct your own mistake and help Google crawl the website the way it should. I do agree it's redundant if you know what you're doing - or if you don't know what you're doing and you're using some CMS such as Joomla.

    For dynamically generated websites, sitemaps are a must. Perhaps in your experiment you did have 1 million pages, but were they using query strings, e.g. ?article=1&id=2 and similar stuff? No? Didn't think so. For that you need URL rewrites, sitemaps, and a lot of effort in other areas. So it's not as simple as you want to make it. Sitemap may help one site, be redundant for another one, but it can't hurt - unless you think 15 minutes spent on creating and submitting a sitemap is a waste of time.
     
    CafaMagician80, Jul 26, 2012 IP
  14. cyndrella

    cyndrella Active Member

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    #34
    sitemap make your website indexing process easier.
     
    cyndrella, Jul 27, 2012 IP
  15. bizworldusa123

    bizworldusa123 Peon

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    #35
    Depends upon the scenario. I found google sitemap quite beneficial for me though i don't have millions of pages but it still help full for me in crawling my pages and notifying about the internal linking issues........

    Thank you
    Bizworldusa
     
    bizworldusa123, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  16. Digital_lover

    Digital_lover Member

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    #36
    I don't think so. I have sitemap as useful.
    Sitemaps are list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process. Sitemap are helpful to know about your site’s dynamic content and the large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
     
    Digital_lover, Aug 5, 2012 IP
  17. ankushkohli

    ankushkohli Peon

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    #37
    For me sitemap is source to get internal link for the site. I use it only for targeted pages on which I want huge traffic, to avoid any kind of spam don't add all page to sitemap.
     
    ankushkohli, Aug 6, 2012 IP
  18. jasminelane

    jasminelane Member

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    #38
    Tells Whole scenario of your site,or we can say current status of your site
     
    jasminelane, Aug 6, 2012 IP