Is it worth it?

I have a few blog sites, and I was wondering if it would be worth my time and effort using google site map.

 

Maybe

How big are your blog websites? Are they pure blog websites?
Have you experienced problems getting indexed? And/or refreshed?

 

yes if u are trying to get pages from your blogs to be crawled and indexed by Search engines then i think it will be useful..

 

It would help in some point..
Anyway,why not? It won't hurt your site if you do.

 

If you do not have problems with indexing - i would say dont bother - as googlebots are in love with blogs and fresh content so they index blogs pretty quickly. But if you want to experiment with the google sitemap webmaster tool, go ahead.

 

I am with max_pain on this issue. I have used sitemaps on some sites and not on others and have not noticed any difference in how fast the sites are indexed.

Because I have seen no real benefit, I no longer waste my time setting up sitemaps on my new sites.

 

Sitemap doesn't help you too much for indexing your homepages, it just lets google know the structure of your website, and maybe help index the sub pages.

 

It does for me.

 

Your blog must be get updated regularly so its content should be get index by google, using sitemap you help Google to find this updations easily resulting indexing of these pages.

 

After frequent update make sure you should ping it using tools such as pingomatic.com

 

Are site maps imperative? When will Yahoo and MSN officially adopt the Google spec?

 

Sitemaps are not imperative.. but its just like guiding the blind man across the road..
Yahoo already has a sitemaps feature here : https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit (take a look below the feed submit box)
As far as I know MSN doesnt have such a feature yet.

 

Sitemaps are only necessary for big sites which have a lot of pages that get generated by a database. For a simple HTML site, or a normal blog, the internal link structure should work just fine for google (or another search engine) to spider it.

 

But does Google really crawls with the help of sitemaps?

 

Example:

If your xml sitemaps file includes LastMod, it will help Google to refresh indexing of changed pages.

 

If your blog already established and have good pr, it is not necessary. Howover, sitemap is just a jump start to attract spiders to visit your site on regular basis

 

sitemaps will help if you have hidden pages without proper links to them. sitemaps will allow googlebot to find those pages