Since I am relatively new the sitemap thing, what is the purpose of sitemap? I cannot get a grip of what it is yet. Thanks.
The purpose of sitemap is to getting your Webpages into the Google index. The search results provided by Google are from their index. Since 85% of the Internet happens as the result of a Google search, being well indexed can be a good thing.
A sitemap is helpful if you've got important pages or pages you want indexed that are deep in you site, or if you've got search engine unfriendly dynamic url's. Spiders generally don't follow more than 2 or 3 links deep into a site, and if you've got an important part of your site that's a few clicks from the homepage, you can increase the chances of it getting indexed by creating a sitemap (a page with links to places on your site). The links on your sitemap (place the sitemap link on your homepage) would only be 1 click away at that point. Im sure you can find much better info than that, lol it's late
I was introduced to the sitemap from a google engineer who said it would help get my forums indexed. Now my site has over 1.5 million pages indexed as before sitemap it never broke 200k. I think its great for urls like ?sdsd=2323&wwew=sdsds ect..
It took me 2 days before my entire website was indexed by google after submitting it. Before that I've waited about a couple of weeks and nothing happened although I had a couple of backlinks already.
site map is a awesome tool. I have a stock amazon (fresh from nintendo) store that has ZERO modifications. All I have done is sitemap and it has 100k pages indexed and getting decent se traffic but most of all its worth about 38k coop weight. Yes im a total coop slut now even tho i know im like 1 year to late.
I put up a sitemap for a new site that was only 2 weeks old. the sitemap went up 3 days before the newest pagerank update. I'm already out of the sandbox with a pagerank of 4 (thanks to the COOP as well).
I read it somewhere that if you use the google sitemap, you will have a better chance of getting higher ranking when people search, well besides the paying ones of course.
Google has excellent info on this on their site, type Google Sitemaps and you will get there. I set mine up as a cronjob, every week a new map is generated and submitted to google.