Sitemap for dynamic website

How important is it for dynamic sites to submit a Sitemap to google in terms of serp result?

Another thing, some of my external links involve php redirection to hide affiliate links, and google doesn't allow this for the Sitemap, is there any way around this?

Thanks

 

I think sitemaps are very important, especially since google finds it hard if there are too many '?' in the web address. Try to make your links static

 

Sitemaps work as a helper for the bots to crawl your site. Even if you don't have a sitemap bots would try to crawl your site. With the sitemap you are helping the bot telling it about your important pages.

 

You should create sitemap for your website.
As Google come to know easily how much webpages your website is having.

 

Yes, a valid XML sitemap is a must for every website; don't forget the auto-discovery sitemap directive in your robots.txt. The only different between a dynamic website and a static website is one has the actual web doucment files for each page and the other creates them based on variables, to Google it really can't tell the difference. The issue with the PHP redirects is simple, just remove them from the sitemap after it's built or have them filtered out before you build the sitemap.

 

Never Forget SiteMap

And also keep check on links

 

Create a valid sitemap and submit it to Google Sitemaps... It will get continually indexed and you will see the rewards of this...

 

Google sitemaps are the most important part of getting all your pages indexed and ranked efficiently. They come highly recommended.

 

Zero, XML sitemaps do nothing for your SERP rankings.

 

Well, that's not entirely true (it's true 99.975% of the time though). If someone has a really large site (I'm talking lots and LOTs of pages here), that sitemap.xml file could be the difference between one or two pages being indexed or not at all. I'd rather have the site map tell the search engines that a page exists and ensure that it gets indexed rather than take the chance that the search engines miss a few (and miss out on having them indexed and thus ranked)...

 

This is one i will have to disagree on Dan.

An XML sitemap provides zero benefit to your ranking, Google have even said this themselves.

If a page or pages do not have enough link equity to be indexed "without" a sitemap, simply getting them indexed via a sitemap will do no good because these pages won't have enough authority to rank or pull traffic anyway. They will have no authority because they weren't even found by a link, just an XML sitemap which passes nothing.

Being indexed and ranking well are two completely different things.

I'd much rather "know" which pages on a site are not indexed, and correct the issue via internal linking structure or driving backlinks to these pages or sections of the site in order to get them both indexed and ranking.

An XML sitemap just ruins this data by effectively masking which sections of your site are having indexing issues and need attention. To me applying an XML sitemap is like throwing a band-aid on a site and pretending it's fine when there's SEO to be done.

An HTML sitemap, that's a different story these help create a flat site architecture, pass link equity/Pagerank around the site, provide internal keyword rich anchor text links, help the crawlers "and" help the user to boot.

 

That's not what I'm talking about. And yes, I know that Google said that an XML sitemap won't help improve a page's ranking. What I'm saying is that for those pages that may not be indexed normally (let's say a hypothetical Web site didn't have an XML sitemap, or a regular HTML one, and didn't have every page linking to each other, or use some other sensible menu structure here), being listed in a sitemap.xml file could make all the difference between those pages being found and being missed.

Besides, I also said nothing about ranking well - just being indexed. If the page can't rank well on its own, then the site likely has bigger problems to begin with in the first place.

Good point, and something I've often said in the past (I've been re-thinking my position on it lately,though if you can't tell). I'll use them on the sites I create from the ground up (since my information architecture process will tell me how the pages will be linked to each other before they're even designed, written, or coded for that matter), but if I'm working on someone else's site, I'll want to know PDQ (like last week, actually) which pages aren't being indexed properly so I can deal with them ASAP (usually via an IA audit of my own).

And is something I tell anyone with anything more than the most basic of Web sites to use anyway.

 

Technically a sitemap does nothing for your actual rankings....

But it will help you to get indexed initially and get onto the ranking pages. But a website with a sitemap will not get preference over one without, if you want to put in that way...

 

sweetfunny, what horrors have I unleashed here tonight?

 

Given the above situation, an XML sitemap won't help these pages. Sure, if you enter the pages URL in Google you can pull it up, or if you structure an extremely long query to only return a few pages of results the URL will be amongst the other results somewhere... But i don't call that helping the sites in any shape or form.

Simply put if a page doesn't have any authority and can't be found without a sitemap it won't rank well or pull traffic, and typically when this is the case your users will have problems finding it through navigational means also.

The solution is revised navigation, along with internal and external linking to the effected pages or section of the site. The idea of SEO isn't to tell Google you have a page, it's to put that page to the top of the SERP's.

An XML sitemap is a band-aid that ruins valuable data that indicates what areas of the site search engines are having issues with. To me patching indexing problems with an XML sitemap is bad SEO.

 

Given the above hypothetical situation, I'd still use the sitemap.xml file to let the search engines know they're there. But nothing more. And you are right - the navigation would need to be revised, if not corrected outright (knowing the way I do things though, I'd probably throw it all out and start over from scratch, keeping an internal list of what all the pages, images and other "public" files were so I could 301 redirect them as needed when the new version went live).

I'm not suggesting that a sitemap be used as a standalone "solution" - because it's not. I'm saying that I'd use it as a first step in a process to correct the real underlying problem. What that problem is, and what needs to be done to fix it, would have to be determined on a case-by-case basis (for our hypothetical situation above, I'd be taking a long and hard look at the information architecture and content of the site, plus the external links, plus the anchor text used).

 

I wouldn't, personally i'd use links to both let search engines know they are there "and" get them on the road to ranking. An XML sitemap won't do this.

It still does nothing to correct the problem, all it does is mask what's going on underneath the surface. Knowing how Google spiders a site, how fast, what pages, how long after publication or modification etc are all great indicators of what's going on. This data it too valuable to me to throw out the window with an XML sitemap that does nothing to increase my rank.

I think we will have to agree to disagree on this one.

 

Not by itself, no. By the time I get around to "poking my finger inside the hole in the dam" so to speak, I'll already know what's going on and be working to correct it (which as you said, a sitemap.xml file won't do by itself). Besides, with most of the work I do, tossing extra links at a page won't really do much to begin with (I'd still toss those links the page's way, but only as an "investment in the future" - and given the way I tend to rebuild sites, it'll often involve a couple 301 redirects anyway.

 

I'd have to agree with this statement as well; a XML sitemap is only going to really tell spiders "Hey, this web page exists and it's located here" which may or may not effect if it's indexed; however when it comes to actual rankings in the results it will have no effect.

I think people tend to forget getting indexed and getting ranked are two different things. I think you and Dan Schulz are on the same chapter just a different page and mis-understanding each other.

 

Heh, I've been rebuilding a couple Web sites from the ground up lately - in case you couldn't tell based on my posts in this thread...

Shows where most of my attention's been lately.