Are sitemaps really necessary?

i hear different opinions about google sitemaps. some say there's no need to have a google friendly sitemap, some say a user friendly sitemap is preferable over an xml sitemap. and some even say it's not neccessary at all if you have a good navigation on your website. is there an authority that really knows the answer to this here?

 

If you have a decent text-based nav system that accounts for all areas of your site that you want googlebot to follow then MAYBE a sitemap can be dispensed with. However, I don't advise it. Sitemaps are good for more than just telling SE bots where your content is located. They also tell the bots how frequently they should crawl your site.. as well as other information.

 

Use a sitemap if your site architecture is difficult to discover.

 

Sitemap is more important than you think, you know what, when I generated a sitemap and submitted it, more than 1/4 of my crawled pages where added and I noticed a difference in traffic

 

Your pages could get crawled when you submit a sitemap. It could help your traffic in the long run.

 

Thee was a study recently published between UCLA and Google that stated that out of a sample of indexed URLs... 78% were found by sitemaps before they were 'naturally crawled'.

http://www2009.eprints.org/100/1/p991.pdf

Yes, you can do SEO without a sitemap.... but why wouldn't you use a sitemap? With so many places to get a sitemap, it's not difficult at all.

 

I have used different kinds of sitemaps. I don't think it matters. I have never had a problem with google being biased towards any particular one.

 

so use sitemap to make crawler more easier to crawl in my blog?

 

Normally, Google can index all the pages of a site by following link from link, its not necessary to have a xml formatted sitemap, its necessary only when you want to include some pages that are not navigable from other pages.

 

If you site is dynamic then I think you must need google sitemap.

 

Google xml sitemap define how many important web pages you have. If you have not proper navigation and your all links are not presents at navigation then we have to create web based sitemap and xml sitemap can give additional advantage to your website and you can get good ranking also.

 

All search engines crawling all pages IF can be find.
One of the main benefits of using a sitemap is the speed.
Also many times especially if you use flash maybe exist links which are not detected or mentioned , with sitemap inform search engines about them. Also could help your traffic in the long run.

 

For wordpress users, it would be nice to have a plugin create a sitemap of your blog because it would be less time consuming.

 

No. It really depends on what your website is for. Some websites contain a lot of content and all of it is important. For websites like those, a sitemap would be useful because the links act as a kind of shortcut. You shouldn't need a sitemap if your website information can be more or less streamlined.

 

The people that say you do not need a sitemap usually have small sites. If you have less then a few thousand pages, maybe less then 100,000 pages - then maybe you do not need a sitemap.

If you have more then 100,000 pages, I suggest you have a sitemap.

If your site has more then 500,000 pages - 1 million page, you really need a sitemap.

Google is good at crawling pages, but its not perfect. If you have a large site or a popular forum that gets thousands of post a day, you really need a sitemap. And make sure the sitemap is submitted to your google webmaster tools, yahoo site explorer and bing webmaster tools.

 

A sitemap is like a guide for Google to crawl your pages. Without that guide, it is difficult for it to find your pages unless ofcourse you have very good back links.

 

I believe, with no real proof just from analyzing my various sites, that the sitemap helps in Google.

 

There are many opinions for that but imo sitemap is good for website.

 

I totally agree that a sitemap is neccessary, especially if your website is very complex or difficult to navigate, google that made it available knew why they created it for us

 

Google bot is terrible at indexing. You need a sitemap. My site has about 25,000 pages, and before I submit a sitemap, total indexed pages are around 1988! After submission, roughly 12800. I noticed a lot more traffic since then.