Are sitemaps good or bad?

I voted "alright".

They can be terrible though if they're outdated (they don't contain all the pages) or if there are errors. A normal site doesn't have much use for sitemaps, the pages will get indexed anyway. I got a site with dynamically generated thousands of pages, so we need a dynamic sitemap - both for Google and on one page of the site so all pages are linked to.

For comparison, I also have a forum, it doesn't have a sitemap and the content is indexed immediately.

I don't think sitemaps help at all in most cases. Sitemaps are helping the robot index the site, and the robot won't have any problems with your site anyway - unless it's a very complicated dynamic one with query strings and similar stuff.

 

It's a good solution for search engines. And in webmaster tool you can add it very easy.

 

Sitemaps helps Google to search your website pages. With the help of sitemap Google reach to your website's inner pages. So Sitemap help to index the website in search engine.

 

Sitemaps are easy to implement and can only do good for your site. Why would you not utilize this?

 

That's 100% true