Sitemaps - How important?

Hi sorry if this has been asked elsewhere i didn't try and look but couldn't find anything so point me in the right direction if there is

All i want to know is by submitting a Sitemap to Google, does it affect how high you appear in search results? A lot? a little? or not at all.

Thanks

 

Not much unless you have an extremely large site. If your link structure and site architecture are done properly, you'll not have much need for one. The most important thing is to have relevant content and get links from other sites.

 

Thanks, just what i wanted

 

sitemap can save your bandwidth sometime, google will only download your new page in sitemap not download whole site to look for new staff

 

Hi- if you want you can check out my most recent SEO Tutorial on sitemaps, you might find it useful.

 

It's very important to create a XML site map. It makes it easer for the SE to index your site. But when you do the site map submission in conjunction with Google or Yahoo "Webmaster" Tools, you can see details about your site that you will never get.

Anyone that is not using Google's Webmaster Tools should.

 

I only use sitemaps on large sites to avoid google using to much bandwidth and for faster indexing.

On small sites I dont think it matters at all.

 

Anything that makes a google bots life easier cant be a bad thing. Although in googles sitemap section it says it has no effect at all on pagerank -

 

I agree with tussin. I'm pretty that sitemaps doesn't affect the pagerank at all. What it does though, is that it always keep Google informed on changes in your site structure, which might have taken a longer time to update if you wouldn't use a sitemap.

 

thanks for the helpful info.

 

I don't have a sitemap. Googlebot crawls my website every single day. Why should I bother with Googlebot, it is his work to find new content on my site.

 

Google's sitemap does not influence your sites ranking. You only need it in case you have a very complicated and large structured website. It is also used by the spiders to find and index the pages it didn't know before. Therefore, you also need to keep your sitemap updated.

If you're using dreamweaver to build your site, you need a separate sitemap builder to do the job. However, if you have a blog or cms type website, I think there are lots of plugins who can auto generate and update your sitemap as you update your content.

 

I have not done any formal testing. But for the few sites that I did take the time to submit a sitemap to Google's Webmaster Program, I did not notice any ranking difference. In fact I deleted some of the sitemaps and I have not noticed any drop off in ranking.

The information they provide can be useful. I already use other tracking software and I don't have time to look at every piece of information.

And it gets very old to play the Google game and jump through all the hoops. I don't chase Google Ranking so I don't really care. If I get ranked well there then fine, if not that's fine too. I'm not saying I don't want the traffic from Google, I'm just saying I don't need Google to make money.

 

I just do it to keep google happy, Google Webmasters has a section for it so i add it. Not too long to add so i dont see why not adding it.

I like going into the sitemap area and seeing all the pages i have, and then seeing how many are indexed by google. It just makes me feel good =]

 

A sitemap might help with traffic if it helps Google find and index your pages sooner. If your pages are indexed sooner, you have more chance of hits and traffic sooner but it won't make you rank higher.

 

I don't think that sitemaps help the website owner at all - they just help Google, which is why they promote them in their Webmaster Console.

But, a sitemap is easy to set up so if you have one then use it - what the hell, it's no financial lose, and little time lost.

 

Sitemaps do NOT help the page rank. They do help Google to index your site. Case in point. I have a website that has 5 pages in it. This site got crawled once every other day and so any new or changed content was indexed. I was on page 1 for some pretty important keywords, relevant to the site. Anyway, the site went through a re-write and the site map wasn't taken into consideration. There were errors for approximately a week and a half. Google dropped the site. The page rank is still there, but none of my content is indexed.

 

Oh I think sitemap is important when you have a big site, well getting indexed in a search engine is difficult enough.

 

Sitemap is also important for new websites. Based on experience, you can have a new site indexed by Google in two weeks just by simply submitting a sitemap.

 

Exactly, they won't help your sites ranking or PR at all.