How important are sitemaps?

How important are sitemaps? I keep reading about them -- but am unsure of how important they really are.

Do they really help your listings with google/yahoo/etc? My pages seem to be doing fine with normal links. Does it help gain ranking/PR or is it solely just to help the spiders navigate easier?

 

I would say that it just helps the spiders navigate your site better. If you have some sort of weird html, srcipt, etc it wont waist time trying to go through your site. I would use it. It could mean the difference in whether your site does get indexed or not. I wouldn't consider it to help you with your page rank. That is more on the quality of the page and links you get from other sites.

 

It' not important at all! If spider arrives at your site, it will crawl every link.

 

if sitemap is not important why google will recommend using it ?

 

No i don't agree with you guy's. Sitemap help you include a higher proportion of your pages in the index and let you to notify Google on the changes, which is a good thing. The other thing is Diagnostics - it helps to find about potential crawling problems including 404 not found pages and robots.txt file.

 

I agree should always include sitemaps in your site. Submitting a sitemap through Google's webmaster tools is one of the fastest ways to get your site indexed. I got one of my sites through in less than three weeks via webmaster tools!! And that's pretty fast for Google.

 

Sitemap is one of the best way to your website indexed by google search engine. It can provides webmaster a clear picture on how the web site is organized. Also, when your website get complicated, the site map button can provides a shortcut to the visitor to navigate between different pages in your site.

 

Google say that sitemaps help them find pages they wouldn't automatically find, which I think is misleading. The primary use of a sitemap is to fast-track your site being indexed.

I launched two blogs in May, both on Wordpress with the XML Sitemaps plugin. One plugin didn't work properly and I didn't get a sitemap submitted (I should have noticed but I didn't) and it took until July for it to be correctly indexed. The other blog, launched at the same time with a working sitemap, took less than two weeks.

Sitemaps are thus very useful. They're basically a way of giving Google a heads up both for new sites and for new content on existing sites.

 

Site map is a page wherein the structure of a web site is clearly shown to a visitor. They can then choose the page to which they want to go with just one click.

 

We have websites with duplicates content, the one with sitemap is better indexed in google.

 

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Sitemaps are really useful when you start out and need to get your site crawled.

 

will crawlers still crawl even if a site has weird html error and html the validity? i tweaked my html codes.

 

It depends - what exactly is the problem? Webmaster tools should help.

 

what are the sample errors which may prevent crawlers?
what i have is a template error.

 

google/yahoo/msn/bing/other SE recommend sitemap because it make them easier to crawl sites.
since sitemap could be recognize by put the pat of it in your robots.txt, it wouldn't be matter anymore to submit your sitemap to google/yahoo/SE to their tools;
however the tools that they offer will be very useful for webmasters to get may information about SE bots activities in sites and help webmasters to tweak their sites.

so if you asked, in my opinion;

Do they really help your listings with google/yahoo/etc?
No

My pages seem to be doing fine with normal links. Does it help gain ranking/PR or is it solely just to help the spiders navigate easier?
it solely just to help the spiders navigate easier

 

IMHO, in the future, it might be good if wordpress can integrate the platform with sitemap so, we don`t need extra time for install it.

 

I think Sitemap is important.

 

ok most people think sitemaps are very useful. my current site does not have a sitemap but still seems to be fully indexed. i am however still creating it so i think it can take some time for google to index new pages. as such i think i will try and incorporate a sitemap to help spiders crawl all pages.

 

Is this a summary that everyone can agree with?

If you have a simple static site with good linking within the site, there is no clear benefit of having and maintain a Google XML sitemap.

If you have a dynamic site which does not have a simple way to link to all of the pages, a google xml sitemap is vital to making sure that as many pages as possible get indexed.

Agreed?