A sitemap lists the pages of your site, making it easier for spiders to fully index it. Depending on your link structure, getting them crawled without a sitemap can take longer and less complete. There is no need for one, it's doesn't affect your rankings, it's just helpful for getting a site crawled, especially if you have orphan pages.
Sitemap will help you to crawl your pages easily. It will help your site specially if your site is new then it can crawl your pages quickly.
Sitemap does not make your site 'better' in the eyes of Google. But in the eyes of your visitors it is.
Is not robots.txt is enough for a site being crawled by Search Engines? What's the benefit of sitemap over robots.txt
Robots.txt can be used to exclude the search engines from access parts of your site, like if you don't want the image direcory ending un in Google Images.
Sitemaps helps ur site to a greater extent. Like if ur site is effected by some spam backlinks, u will make all efforts to get rid of those sites. If u are uanble to do so, then u have to re-name the url's of your website..This will hamper your PR but if u regsiter with sitemaps, then u will regain the PR in a quick time and get rid of those spam backlinks both at the equivalent span of time
i did some digging and found this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334 "The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks..." "...At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated..." looks like the site map and the layout demonstrated in the pic above are 2 completely different things.
There are sometimes misunderstandings concerning "sitemaps". There are actually two types of sitemaps: 1) the user-friendly .html sitemap that you should put in your website to give your visitors a concise listing of your content. An illustration would be my http://www.jimfeeney.org/sitemap.html. That is the public one to make visitors' surfing easier. 2) the .xml sitemap for Google, Yahoo!, etc. This sitemap allows you to list all your pages in one concise file which Google and Yahoo! will crawl, thus helping you to get your pages indexed more easily. An illustration of this more "technical" sitemap would be my http://www.jimfeeney.org/sitemap.xml. I recommend that you use both types of sitemap. To generate the .xml one, I suggest an online tool like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. And open a free account at Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer to submit (and resubmit) your sitemap.xml file.
OKOK, you solve the question in my mind............ I have tried xml-sitemaps.com, it is handy............. still do not know why there is a market for paid sitemaps software or script? Another question, I read some doc that there is a way to update xml sitemaps automatically........... how to get this done? Thanks
Question 2: Sorry, I'm not sure how to update .xml sitemaps automatically. If there is, I would love to hear it. Question 1: Lots of "free" sitemap generator websites are only free up to a limit of pages, say 500 or so. After that, any bigger sitemap requires that you use the paid software. Still well worth it, if the price is right.
Yes, I just face the problem of 500 pages...........!!! It that enough to submit "part of my sitemaps --- 500 pages)? Or it worhs to buy one........... which one to buy is of best value?
Based on my excellent experience with their free one (under 500 pages), I would not hesitate to recommend the $19.99 unlimited version at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html. For that small price you would be much better off than trying to keep your sitemap under 500 pages and not list some other pages. Spend the small amount once, and you'll always be able to build even huge sitemaps in .xml format.
ok, so I think I got the answer..... pay US$19.99, and use the paid version of xml-sitemaps............. (OK, I will go ahead for that.) ---- thanks all for your advice. One more point is: how to setup this once and it will update automatically forever......... (while I am digging this subject, I did read some doc that have this feature....however, I think this is not using xml-sitemap, may be other script...) .......
Hi Trichnossis, Thanks for your info. Could you please more detials on how to "list of your web site to googlebot with your sitemap"? I didnt' see that kind of feature in the sitemap software so far........ did I miss anything? daniel