Google Sitemaps, anybody using?

Is anybody using Google Sitemaps? Had any success/failure with them?

For anybody that isn't aware, Google release a sitemap bot which will read in a sitemap file (in xml format) that lists all the pages on your site and you rank them yourself. It's supposed to help with them crawling your site.

I haven't tried them yet because they're still really new (only 2 months old?), but haven't heard of anything really remarkable about them so far.

Any comments?

Google Sitemaps: Google Sitemaps Home

 

I use it, and when I check the sitemap account page it shows that G is grabbing it every so often. I don't know if it helped, but I do know that it can't hurt.

J

 

I have noticed an increase in visits from Google's spiders since submitting my XML sitemap.

 

<3 <3 <3 the google sitemaps. Getting sites online and indexed within 48 hours rules.

 

Currently, I only use it for startup sites.

 

yes, i'm using the sitemap, and google appears to be downloading it several times a day; and yet it refuses to even acknowledge my site in its index, or ANY backlinks to it

nutjobs!

 

you wont get any backlinks but you should see googlebot come visit within a few days

 

I used 1 one 1 site about 2 weeks ago, yet only 5 out of 35+ pages are indexed. I used it again for a new site about a week ago, the bot comes around, but I'm not indexed yet.

 

I've just tried it out for my new site that I've launched, we'll see if it helps

 

I plan to test it out myself, seems results are different for everyone.

 

Used it and within a couple of weeks got an extra 180,000 pages indexed that hadn't been discovered before!!!

 

I used it on a new *in-the-start-up* wordpress site and it works wonders. All pages indexed and googlebot comes around ever so often.

When Google encourages you to give them a sitemap you'd be a fool not to, that is of course if you consider traffic from google worth anything.

 

Not much for me, just an increase of visits by the spider. Hopefully some good will come of it very soon.

 

I used it and went from 56 chached pages to 853 in a week. It worked for me. I an using the sailing version of the php sitemap generator from enerion (sp?). It is linked from goog's pages. I like it so far, not sure if it helps with ranking though.

 

yes, get indexed .. but first make sure robots.txt is there

 

I just sent one in yesterday on one of our smaller sites as a test. Went from 653 pages in the index to 878 pages in the index. I used a windows based program to generate my XML map. It works pretty good, has a spider that can crawl your site and adds any pages it finds to the list. Seemed to find most of them. Also lets you import your current page list from google as a baseline. Found it off the google sitemap site.

 

Went from a little over 300 pages to a little over 1500 for a site thats around 10 months old.

 

For mine (a new site), the spider seems to come more often, but it's only indexing the first page. Mind you, I've only given it about two weeks, so it may just be a small delay in indexing the rest of the site.

 

Yes, it's a great way to get a brand new domain to be visited by google. Works great for that.

 

I cannot stress how amazingly good Google sitemaps are. If you have a new site, or a large site with a great deal of unindexed content (think 20,000+), go for it!