Google sitemap vs. html sitemap in footer

Just wondering, heard a few people with supposedly bad luck with google sitemaps.

What would be most effective. Submitting sitemaps to google and yahoo. OR. making a html sitemap of your entire site linked in footer in each page of your website.

Which would have the best results for spidering of your entire site?

 

Why not do both? I've got google sitemaps and some sites do fine and other's haven't picked up any from it. I think sitemaps only really help if your site is hard to navigate... and even if your page does get cached because of a google sitemap it still won't rank unless you've got internal navigation pointing to it (unless of course other sites are linking there). In short, both are a plus but you don't really need either if your site is structured well.

 

I almost always definitely do both.

First of all, only Google of course uses a Google Sitemap.

And second, a regular sitemap is a great place for one to utilize anchor text for every one of your pages.

 

I use both, but be carefull with how you frame your meta tags. Basically, a sitemap can have hundreds of links on it. Build your sitemap in a logical way for your users, for navigation purposes, but if your sitemap has more than a hundred pages, then I would definetly put a "no index, follow" in it.

I was suffering for the longest time until I tried this out with my site. I couldn't understand why google wasn't picking up my pages, and in fact, was seriously reducing my page count in the index. I read an article about too many links on a page, and decided, what the hell, the page is made for my users, not for the Goog, so I put a no index, follow, in the head.

Bingo, a few days later, Goog started deep crawling my site again. I think that the alg basically said, "this page has no merit, to many links and it looks suspicious, let's not follow it" and didn't follow the links from the sitemap. With the no index tag in there, I guess that the alg no saw the page differently, as in, "ok, this page has no intention of being in the index, but it does say that the links on it are important, so let's follow those."

LOL. I'm talking about Googlebot as if it's a toy poodle or something.

Anyway, that one change made the difference. It also made a difference when I applied it to my ALL PRODUCTS page, which is basically a link to each and everyone of my products. Again, WAAAAYYYYYY over 100 links. Changed the tag to no index, follow, and bamm, two or three days later, the Goog deep crawled even further.

So make your sitemap page for your user, with a plain and easy way for them to follow your navigation, but pop the no index tag, follow tag in, and you should see a reward in a week or two.

 

A google sitemap (which works for yahoo as well) contains a list of all of your url's.

A html sitemap (which should be linked from all the pages on your site) should not be used to link to all your pages. Just to the important pages.

 

IF you had to decide on one or the other but not both, go for HTML... it's universal.

I agree with most folks here... why not both? For that matter, why not 6 versions to cover Google, Yahoo (text file), HTML, OPML, ROR, and RSS? With an armada of sitemaps like this, you're sure to be available to every search engine and human visitor.

A solution for the 'too many links' on the HTML site map scenario would be to limit the number of links that your sitemap generator places on each HTML page.

All of these issues and more have solutions at AutoMapIt.

 

I can agree with the whole "all of them thing"

You can probably get a good effect from a HTML sitemap if you link it well from allover your site.

For best effect, make sure that all of the anchor text in the HTML sitemap links contain appropriate and relevant keywords.