How long does it take to effect Site: after loading Sitemap

Hi, I just created a sitemap.xml and used google sitemaps for it.

How long does it take to see effects ? like should you expect more site: results?

 

I never saw any benefits of improvements using sitemaps for Google

I had all pages indexed without sitemap before thanks the a well refined system of announcing new posts/pages properly usually all new pages appeared in G within 3-4 days

I had the feeling repeated times that WITH sitemap new pages are indexed slower than w/o sitemap

I would be intested to know if anyone ever experienced a clear advantage of using sitemaps. the benefit of sitemaps is on G side - less work
or for those who have poor links to new pages.

G normally "finds" a new page within a day and has it processed some 2 days latger ...

 

The MAJOR advantage to using sitemaps is for larger sites. While I have spidered a few one-page websites (yes, the sitemap made the site increase in size by 100%), sites with multiple levels of navigation tend to need sitemaps.

Another good scenario for a site that needs sitemaps would be a website using an application that uses many session ID's (turn off your cookies and surf your site). These are to help the web app know who you are and to help make the visit to the site better, but it also creates multiple URLs for the same page. Each sessionID is unique so it can really add up. Google and other search engines tend to ignore these types of pages.

There are a few sitemap creation services that offer a way to strip out session IDs including AutoMapIt which strips out the 'common' session IDs and allows you to enter which query keys should be removed as well. This is good if you have odd session ID's like 'osCsid' for osCommerce or 'zenid' for Zen Cart. It also helps when you have sorted URLs to prevent the page from sorting the same list by several columns... both up and down

The Google sitemaps program DOES give you something back in the way of stats on their site. While you can get your stats in any number of ways from many stats programs, it is nice to see from Google what they think and which terms you may be coming up on in their results pages.

How long to see results? anywhere from 2-3 days to about 2 weeks from what I've seen/heard from people on the web. You can shoot for the quick end of this by filling an untapped niche and by gaining many links from other sites.