I have a G Sitemap, verfied and all working great. It is updated daily with new pages and amended pages are also entered daily and site map is updated. Google admin tells me that some pages are visited daily but the pages that are new or updated and site map is updated to show these changes take up to a week to get indexed. Is this right?? Seems sitemap is a waste of time as I can have non sitemapped page indexed just as quickly. Thanks
Sitemaps are not a waste of time. It will help the robot crawl you webpages easier and faster. You could get your pages indexed by having some links on other pages pointing to them.
Having Sitemap is not a waste of time. Its really worth to have sitemap. Now for page indexing.. there is not any define time period for index. It depends on your site. Site updation, pages, back links, navigation structure, site history etc.
Having sitemap is not a waste of time, but if you spend time update it everyday day, then I do think it's a waste of time. Sitemap is like an internal link structure, and will tell the spiders to crawl these sub urls. Remember, it's just crawl, not index. To index a page, it's the problem of google, not sitemap. Normally in 2 weeks without updating sitemap, google can index your modified pages. Maximum I saw was 1 month.