I have self hosted wordpress site. i created my XML sitemap file using google xml sitemap plugin. But my question is it still necessary to manually submit a sitemap to search engines?
Hi Naren, My answer is Yes. First we should know why we are creating sitemap & why it is important & if we go through the below link hope you will get your answer: http://www.web-site-map.com/ It will help you to increase the number of indexed pages & it is suggested to create sitemap manually mentioning priority, frequency etc. Priority can be from 0 to 1 like .9,.7.8.5 etc. & it helps the spider to determine how much importance you are giving that particular page & frequency can be daily, weekly, monthly & yearly. It helps the crawlers to understand how frequent they crawl your webpages. FYI: You should mention the sitemap url in robots.txt file & submit this in Google webmaster also. Thanks Sayeri
even without a sitemap, google indexes all possible links (unless blocked by .htaccess and robots.txt) sitemap (and link proiorities like 1.0, 0.9, 0.8.....) is only a way you expect google to crawl in that order and at that rate. but usually google bot crawls at its own rate (most frequently crawled sites are the ones frequently updated and has huge traffic to those links)
Without sitemap Google bot can crawl the links but through sitemap you can show the urls that you want to crawl to Google bot & in this way it will improve the crawling frequency.
seriously.. i haven't felt usage of a sitemap. its only like a sign board , but google bot need not follow its directions. i saw a 0.5 priority link being indexed first rather than a 0.9 or 1.0 priority link google bot goes by popularity of keywords (used in its search) in your pages, not by what you ask them to do
Maybe, because sometimes search engine could not approach some of the links. Sitemaps make it easy to crawl on every link. Or you can say that if you have bad navigation then you should send sitemap, otherwise it is not really necessary.
Yes, It is always good that you have two types of Sitemaps for your website. XML sitemap is always good for the search engine to index out the complete web pages of your website. While HTML sitemap is good for the user prospective.
It is not necessary to submit a sitemap to search engine but yes it is good to submit because it helps google robot (googlebot) to crawl/find your site links.
Simply think it deeply. If it's not necessary to submit sitemap to SE, then why Google Webmaster tools have an option to submit it there? That's why I submitted my blog's sitemaps there.
No.... its not necessary, If you have the good quality content you will attract the search engine automatically... XML Sitemap is only for the search engine not for the user.
If you want that each pages of your website is indexed in the search engines, then it is necessary to submit your submit your sitemap in the search engines.
Yes, its compulsory, its not a one time process, if you made any changes that time also should submit sitemap.
I hope you are running a blog site which is having dynamic urls. You can create a sitemap including your main sub pages and category pages if you have any. And as you know its not possible to generate a site map again and again with newer posts added to your blog site and more and more sub pages are created.