Sitemaps Necessary?

Just wondering are sitemaps necessary? Can't Google figure out how to index a site on its own? What are the perks gained from creating a sitemap with Google?

 

If you have a 'normal' site:
* homepage --> 10 categories --> 10 pages per cat
you don't need a sitemap as far as I can tell, Google will find your pages.

If you have a site like mine:
* homepage ---> 2nd page --> 10 categories --> 1 page per cat --> 100 real pages
you might want to let google know that the real information is on the deepest pages, not on the homepage.

My experiences (* see footer) are that using the <priority> tag can help you getting google index the most important pages of your site. You need to get them indexed first before people will find them!

Set the priority tag to 1.0 for pages you really think are important, and 0.0 for the not so important ones.

Google assumes that your homepage is your most important page. that is just not always the case.

But most important: Google says: sitemaps will not hurt you!


(*note: I created a tool that generated 1500+ sitemaps and watched them closely)

 

Do you think its critical that my site has a sitemap since I use a complicated JavaScript menu? Also what sitemap generating tool do you guys recommend?

 

you have fairly new site, no pagerank, but some 'future pagerank' values (3~4), so google doesnt love you yet.

just create a sitemap yourself , submit it to google and see what happens. Worst case: nothing, but if you have any luck: your inner pages will be crawled too


On your homepage, there are now visible links to inner pages: try to fix that first. add a <NOSCRIPT> part or something like that.



good luck!

 

Thanks for the input. I created a HTML sitemap on the main page for now. Also I created an XML sitemap and google is pending verification and will crawl it soon, we'll see what happens.

One of the cool benefits to Google Sitemaps are the statistics, haven't seen them yet though.

 

Adding a sitemap makes it easier for google to visit all of your pages. In the land of SEO this is always a plus.

 

I recommend google sitemaps, because (as you can see here: http://www.google.ro/search?hl=en&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2005-26,GGLG:en&q=site:cellup.com+shopping) my site was indexed and now I have over 203,000 pages to be found. My SiteMap Index made this happened.

 

It does work very well, I have just submitted the same feed to Yahoo so am waiting to see if it works as well with them.

 

I'm still waiting for results I got nothing yet only one page indexed. I can tell one of my old pages was cached so that tells me that it hasn't been reindexed/recrawled since I made those updates.

 

It simply works. A site I've worked on jumped for the number of indexed pages from 150.000 before sitemap to 2.000.000+ after sitemap. It didn't happen overnight though, it took googlebot well over 2 months to index the site fully with sitemaps regenerated on a weekly basis.
Does it work? Like a dream.

 

I would say it helps a little, but so far I haven't seen a huge difference.

 

Well I guess it is time to give it a shot.

 

yeah give it a try. just keep reading the information on google sitemap group, they post relevant info all the time

 

Make sure you are using <noscript> tags to create a text only menu for search engines and people who don't have javascript.