importance of a site map

How important is sitemap for your website...does it help you get listed better
in google or what does it do...any suggestions would be great.

 

sitemap is a list of your pages. it's a way of giving a list of your pages to googlebot

 

it's very useful thing for spiders.. If you want higher PR, you should have Sitemap

 

It helps getting all pages from your website indexed and speeds up getting changed content crawled. It won't help in boosting your Google PR or anything like that.

 

I just made one, I'll let you know how it goes for my site. Hopefully it'll help some. I just made a simple TXT one.

 

Yes, Sitemap is a great help of your site. It helps spider to easily crawl your pages.

 

It needs to be in .XML form.

 

Exactly, while it's useful to get a site crawled (especially if you have orphan pages) it will help zero, nada, nothing for your ranking or PR.

 

Yes, exactly, it needs to be in .XML form just to get the site easily crawled.

 

I've got a sitemap on my site for about 4 months with no indexed links.

Then I have deleted it, and on the next day I had 5000 indexed links.
So it's fine to rename your sitemap, in order for google to update his index.

 

That might have been just one of those random events, but I am impressed at the results.

 

I've noticed that a few websites that I am now working on had a lot of pages not indexed, fingers crossed that the sitemap will sort that out!

 

First, Google Site Map is the greatest thing Google has done. It give us back the control of what is to be indexed.

As for what format to use, Google doesn't care. But it is recommended by all to use the "sitemap.xml.gz" format (Zipped version).

You can then submit it to Google, Yahoo and MSN (see Free Website Submissions thru their "site submission tool" or do it right and create a Google Webmaster Account. Submitting the site map there will give you great results. If a page is not indexed, then it is your fault and you can check for broken links, etc.

I now use the Google Site Map tool http://gsitecrawler.com/ that can create the xml.gz format.
Of the ~ 35 sites I have used this on, all have been deep index now. Some within 2 weeks.

But for large sites (10,000) it is mandatory to use one.

Hope this help you.

 

Great catanich. That links would be very helpful not to me but for others too.

 

site map is used to let google bot understand your site structure easier, so that it maybe get the information from your site much better tahn you don't do it.

It like when someone told you to go to Store and buy something you may spend a lot of time.
By the way if that person write the wap for you can tell you where is the location of the stuff you have to buy ,it will reduce your time right?

sitemap is not the way to get better ranking in google,but it will help get index from google easier . Then it have a lot of factor to consider to calssify your page rank suck as your back link, your index and more.

If you ask me, all i can say is it will help in the indirect way but not much

 

Everytime I entered a sitemap for my website it dropped in SERPS for 3-4weeks.
I think Google considers spam if you add a sitemap with 50k links. I added 3 sitemaps till now.
I'm afraid now to add more sitemaps.

 

it’s as a light for googlebot

 

can say sitemap is life of any site
before submitting site map i had very less traffic
and after submitting i had huge traffic from Google my site life has been changed