Anybody here get any good out of sitemaps?

I have had some sitemaps but I do not use it anymore since it seems to affect my sites in a bad way! Pages disappear, old pages appear, only the main page is showing up and so on!
The only thing sitemaps are good for is to use the site to tell them about your web site. Do NOT sub mit a sitemap, it ruins your business!!

 

All of my sites with sitemaps have done quite well. High serps, nearly everything is indexed, new pages get picked up quick. Sitemaps tell them where your pages are at... what happens next is up to the pages.

 

I've found that adding sitemaps to google sitemaps definitely increases google's coverage of your site. I've only recently started using them and I've noticed a significant increase in site visitors.

If you're going to use sitemaps, I'd recommend buying a good sitemap generator and using a cron job to have it run once a week or so.

I bought a sitemap generator script for $15 and it was very easy to setup and even easier to use with a huge amount of configurations available! Let me know if you want to know which sitemap generator I used (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post the link here or not).

 

Dear Friends,

With all discussion going on here I came to know that Sitemap is generating good business for you guys.

I had submitted one sitemap last week around 8 days back. Everything was OK with status OK.

But I am still seing only Home page of my site indexed. Why this is happening. I am using the script for Sitemap which was discussed in Google Sitemap FAQ. IS there any problem in using that script.

Please Help.

Nuttymarketer

 

surreal,

Which sitemap generator are you using?

Please post it here.

Thanks,

~VegasMack

 

If you are within 8 days, I would suggest giving it more time. I think I know which tool you are using and many people have been able to use it with good results. Bottom line is that this is entirely up to Google.

 

Well as long as it's ok for me to say, I first used the free online sitemap generator at www.xml-sitemaps.com. I was quite impressed with their online tool so I thought I'd invest in their $15 downloadable tool. I had it set up and running within about 10 minutes and I was even more impressed with this one It has so many configurations that you can use to suit your needs.

I'd recommend trying their free online sitemap generator first to see if you like the results it gives you.

 

good to hear that, but I noticed that google is really slow to index my pages

 

My newer sites without Sitemaps seem to be doing as well as those with them.

It seems as long as a site is regularly adding new pages that Google (and the rest) will crawl and grab the most recent changes and additions.

Richard

 

Yes I was wondering about this. I have a site that is not doing very well in SERPs but has 36k indexed pages in google. The site was sandboxed and is coming out of that slowly I think (it's been over a year). I am wondering if the sitemap helps search rankings, not indexed pages. Since my site has already 36k pages it seems like indexing is not a problem.

Could not having a sitemap cause a site to not show high in rankings?