Site maps really helpful for SEO?

Site maps really helpful for SEO?

 

I don't think so. After reading some posts in DP, I removed my sitemaps from Google Sitemap and the number of visitors increased. I'm not sure whether they are related or not, but I believe so.

 

I think it can be.

The reason for it is so Google can easily find a list of all your pages and not having to do as much work scanning the rest of the net to find your site.

But it is not a replacement for getting yourself linked all over the place, otherwise your PR is unlikely to ever go anywhere.

 

Right now I'm about 60/40 in favor of Google Sitemaps...but we're currently running tests on our sites to determine long-term value. Some top seo experts are actually advising against using xml sitemaps. What do the rest of you think?

 

I didn't know that and I'm really surprised. Now I'm going to remove it too... so... we will see...

 

Removing it from one of my sites got me more indexed pages then it used to have before.

Don't know why it is having an opposite effect.

 

that's surprising! I wonder why those things are happening. but for me, my sitemap is not just only for SEO but also for my visitors. I created my sitemap so that it would be easy for my visitors to navigate on my site.

 

Started using sitemap about a week ago, so far so good.
I believe that Google knows it can crawl x sites of your site per month, if you don't tell Google what needs crawling it will crawl unchanged pages, which will be a waste of resources. That will lead to less pages in your site to be crawled and thus less pages will be indexed.
I think I got around 40% increase in number of indexed pages so far, which is nice. Waiting to see what happens next.

 

site maps are helpful for google to index a site. Indexing can be a fast affair then.

 

I think you're misunderstanding...an HTML sitemap (the one that both visitors to your site and search engines see) is ESSENTIAL. This topic is about XML Sitemaps that are submitted to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer. These are ones that site visitors would probably never see.

 

Thank you WebGeek182!

 

where can i dl seo products?

 

I just created few google sitemaps for my sites, now reading these opposite effects, i am very surprised…

How many people have "opposite effect" of Google Sitemaps?

 

Look guys think about it logically... Anything that makes a Search Engine Spider's life better must be good. Right?

And Sitemap's do this.. Especially Google Sitemaps

Also Google say so themselves that it helps

So take it from the people that make the stuff and stop assuming that because you remove or add a Sitemap that it is the sitemap that makes your Rank or SERP's worse..

Remember SEO is not a science

 

I am having trouble setting up my google sitemap?? I have the basic one but am having trouble setting up the better one.

 

XML Sitemaps - the ones you create and submit through the Webmaster Tools, are only used if GoogleBot can't crawl your site for some reason. Things like broken tags, too many query string parameters, requiring sessions somehow... If your site is like most, and can be crawled by spiders, though, XML Sitemaps don't help.

Think how easy they would be to cheat. Throw up a bunch of pages that you don't link to ( ie not for humans - 'bots only ) and point to them in your sitemap. For a page to get indexed otherwise, it has to have a link pointing to it at whatever point in time a bot crawls the page the link should be on. Harder ( but not impossible of course ) to cheat.

 

I thought Yahoo used html sitemaps, not the xml like google.

 

I find them very very helpful.

 

Well, every search engine reads the html ones on your site, but the xml one you make for Google works for Yahoo and MSN as well. (See sitemaps.org) You can submit your xml sitemap to Yahoo through Yahoo SiteExplorer.

 

If you put the sitemap as a link on the first page, it should be found when Y! or MSN crawls your site though, right?