Hello all, I have a decent network of sites, some of which are doing pretty good and some that seem to fail me in SERPS. I have not submitted a sitemap for any of them. My question is... I know that submitting a sitemap can help Google index your sites better and I am considering doing it, but I would like to know if there is ANY problem that might come up from it. If you can think of ANYTHING, please let me know. Like I said, some of my sites are doing good and I would hate to affect their performance - for the others, they can't get any worse so I don't see a reason why I shouldn't. Also, most of my sites are WordPress blogs... Do you know if the Google XML Sitemap plugin requires me to update it regularly or if it updates itself automatically every time something new is added on the site? In other words, all I have to do is generate the sitemap and upload it to Google Webmaster Tools and then that's it? Thanks so much in advance for all your replies!!
Depends on which Google Sitemap plugin you;re talking about. There's a couple dozen of them. Most of them ping Google though to let it know that the sitemap has been updated. I think though Google just checks every day anyway. At least on my blog that's what I've noticed and I use an offsite generator.
There are few plugins available for wordpress that can help your create sitemap or you can use the default feed and submit it through Google Webmaster Tools. I dont see a reason why it should affect your rankings, but it can help you have more of your pages indexed.
Thank you both for your replies! Would you say that Google XML Sitemap is the best plugin for that? I just need to activate it - submit the sitemap that it generates and then just sit back and let it autoupdate when I make a new post? Also, nobody can think of any negative effects that submitting a sitemap might have? Please think Need to make sure!
I really don't think it makes any difference bro. Just a waste of time unless you have pages that arent linked through normal navigation.