How often does Google check sites that do not utilize a sitemap of any kind? A friend of mine has a web hosting business, which has been around since 2000 (including the website). Out of curiosity, I checked his page rank, and it's a 6! I was kind of amazed, since it has absolutely no sitemap or SEO tactics whatsoever, it hasn't even changed at all since back then...
steady linkbuilding to it over the last 7 years would have something to do with PR, you don't necessarily need a site map if its a relatively small site.
TBPR/PR is based on incoming links, sitemaps simply help Google to identify all your pages, not necessary for a small site, as said above, and totally unrelated to TBPR
Been wondering if it is worth it having a sitemap also since Google seems to index my nonSEO CMS pages, but I heard if you let Google crawl, that they index the URL's as they seem them. Anyone ever heard of this?
One of my sites does not have a sitemap at all, contains only one long page, and is position 3 against 1,800,000 competitors. Backlinks still matter most.
you don't really need to worry about making a sitemap unless you have a reasonably large site. that's probably why it hasn't affected your friend's page rank.