When to Submit a New Site map -- and should you?

Well, I have a pretty big site, and did a Sitemap of it a while back, submitted it, etc. It's been almost half a year, and I haven't submitted another one. Seems to work out fine, still getting good traffic. What does everyone think about regularly submitting new sitemaps to Google for big sites? With blogs, it's easy, it just pings Googs everytime you update. But with hand coded sites, you have to manually generate a new sitemap everytime you want to submit one.

Is there any pro to submitting a new sitemap every 6 months or so or thereabouts? I mean, if Google will just visit the site and follow the links anyway, and in theory will eventually index all your new updates in any case, what's the point?

 

Why don't you add an RSS feed so it will ping automatically to Google?

 

you can also ping the sitemap service at google.

 

I've added the WordPress plugin that pings automatically, as you mentioned. I don't really know if it is this that makes a difference, but I Google seems to really enjoy indexing my site. I mean, it looks like I was never in a sandbox, and new pages are indexed incredibly quickly.

If I had to suggest something, I'd say create a schedule or cron that creates your sitemap and pings Google automatically.

 

Yes, but is there any beneficial reason to continuously update the sitemap?

 

So, okay, I've been reading, and there seems to be two thoughts:

1) It doesn't hurt, so why not submit one?
2) It's a waste of time.

Okay, but here's my thought: If you've already submitted one for a large site, is there any point in re-submitting the site, say, 6 months later? Even if a ton of new content has been added, wouldn't Google find it anyway since Google regular spiders the site anyways?

any thoughts?

 

Ok... The only reason to submit an updated site map is the same reason you submitted one in the first place: to let Google know what pages you have available. You can risk their spider finding everything, but I prefer to cover all my bases.

$.02

 

Any advice on setting up an RSS feed is there a tool you would recommend. Presumably your sitemap would need to be dynamically generated periodically. As far as Google Sitemap Generator is concerned I am having trouble finding an ISP who allows phython scripts to be run Are there alternatives?

JIm Williams JU2

 

I update funnyandfun.com's sitemap regularly to let Google know about the new games/videos links. For awhile I was wondering why Google didn't see half my links. I then realized I had to 'resubmit' my sitemap on a regular basis. After that it finds everything...

 

I would recommend resubmitting. For my personal site, I changed my urls and so I lost page rank for a few weeks. I resubmitted the sitemap right away and in about three weeks, I got back my pagerank. Probably would have took longer if I had not used the sitemap.

 

It looks pretty easy to do. I am in the process of doing it myself. But thanks for the tips and what not to look for. All the comments seem to be informative for me.