Having two site maps, what does it do for you?

OK i have put up two site maps on my www.hybridgolfclub.co.uk website, one is the standard HTML sitemap, (located on the left)
and the second is an XML sitemap located on the right,

what will this do for my rankings, will it improve, or do nothing?

The XML site map i have listed at google sitemaps page.

thanks again

 

sitemap.xml file is used by the google to index your pages faster whereas the sitemap.html file gives an abstract of your site to the visitors.
-Dairyman

 

There's also a third option of a basic sitemap.txt

Have you submitted the xml site map to the search engines? If not, it would be wise to do so together with the txt version too.

 

Are all these types of sitemaps needed? I've never heard of having a .txt file, what is the advantage?

 

You can try check this sitemaps article - it discusses and have examples of HTML, XML, RSS, ROR and text sitemaps.

 

sitemap is necessary to index pages in google

 

I don't think a sitemap is necessary for a search engine to index your site. The search engine will eventually crawl your site without a sitemap. The sitemap allows the search engine to crawl your site more effectively.

My sitemap get's automatically updated every day but google doesn't download it every day. Yet a good bot still visits my forum on a daily basis.

 

While I'd say it's not essential, it certainly wouldn't hurt to have sitemaps. Every little thing can make a difference.