I think google sitemap system is only to tell google about all our pages. It doesn`t affect any crawling frequencies..
Google sitemap system is only to tell google about all the pages we have.. It doesn`t affect any crawling frequecy or times..
Experts needed here pls 1-If I have a site that has a site map to all its folders under that domain and I have choosen some of these folders as subdomains , I know thos subdomain folders are alreadu included in the general site map of the site ,BUT, should I cresat a dedicated site map for each sub domain folder by it self , in another word , is it better ? 2-If I created that dedicated site map to that folder that is a sub domain , so now the pages for that folder has a dedicated site map witihn the subdomain folder and it is also idexed in the site map of the main general site map of the site as all , would that cause any conflict or a loop and delay for the search engine to read the same page again (twice insted of once) because they are in the two site maps ? Thanks
Does Google Sitemap help with indexing new sites? No it doesn`t. It takes the normal time to get crawled.
elias: 1) you need separate sitemap files, 2) no problem. Google sitemaps does not change initial indexing of a site. NO CHANGE. Why should it? All the usual rules still apply (note: in the 3-4 weeks of Google Sitemaps it was different). If you have a small site and Google can't index it properly it's either because you don't have enough value (PR, etc) or your site is miserably linked internally (eg asp.net post-based links, javascript, etc.). In these cases (for small sites) a Google Sitemap file will help, but fixing your site will work much better (and for all engines, imagine that). For larger sites (say >1k URLs) Google sitemaps will help to crawl optimally (speed / frequency + URL choice). Keeping an old Google Sitemap file on a server with dynamic content won't help much though
I submitted some site maps for some of my sites and that was the wrost thing I could do. Now I know that there are some out there that doesn't agree with me, but as soon as I submitted my site maps my rankings dropped and one site disappeared totally and has never made it back. As soon as I realized that there might be a problem with submitting sitemaps I removed them and has slowly started go get better ranking again in the SERP's. Google says a lot and one of the things is, like a lot of people like to repeat like a mantra, that it is good for you to have a site map, deep crawl and all that but for me it has been the opposite, so I have removed all my site maps. If Google want pages in their index so they can make money from it, let them work for it just like we have to do. Sometime in my bad moments with Google, I compare them to a scraper site that they monetize, but I guess.... it's nothing we can do....
I highly doubt that submitting a sitemap was the cause for your drop in rankings. It's much more likely that it was just the normal changes and updates to the Google datacenters. Saying that sitemaps caused it is just too great a leap to me.
Kindly look at the google sitemaps - supported formats. A sitemap in XML format seems to be the best option for google, text format for yahoo works best !! hope this helps everyone !