Hi All, Im back in the world of ecommerce after a 5 year break! I used to sell ringtones before mobile phones became the Sat Nav, MP3, TV combinations they are now! I remember submitting a couple of my sites to google site maps (or using google tools). I ended up losing visits fast - So fast in fact that I would say within a few months I just gave it up as a lost cause! LOL Now I understand my industry died slowly, a few die hards probably make a few pounds at it still. BUT... Should I trust google tools in any way? Should I submit a sitemap? Is it worth the effort? Thanks and a BIG Hello to all in the forum. Glenzo
I regularly publish news stories (multiple times a day) and the occasional article so I find that using the sitemap tool in Google Webmaster Tools is totally invaluable for publishing and getting indexed extremely quickly _ In other words, I don't know what I'd do without it, it gives me a competitive edge so I won't be dropping it any time soon. Yahoo SiteExplorer also helps and Bing Webmaster Tools... Well, it still looks like it's in Beta... As for the traffic side of things I'd throw a few more tools in the kitbag to give it a boost - namely twitter, facebook, digg and any other social media outlets that you find useful.
Any professional will now use Google Webmaster Tools to monitor their sites and use the XML Sitemap to tell Google what pages are to be indexed (all). If you had problems before, it was because of something else, not xml sitemaps or GWT.