Is Sitemap Necessary?

for me sitemap is necessary for every web site for quick indexing.

 

Yes, it is a bit frivolous but it is definetely useful in its own ways.

 

Don't have any sitemaps in my blogs. Im just very lazy to update them. Anyway, sitemap could help search engines to index your site faster

 

My opinion - If you have a small site, with say less then 50,000 pages, then you may not need a site map.

If you have a medium sized site with over 500,000 pages, then YES you need a site map.

If you have a large site with over 1,000,000 pages - a site map is a must have.

Google is good at indexing sites, but its not perfect. The site map helps google find pages it migth have overlooked.

 

you can use Sitemap Generator program, it is very usefull

 

sitemap gives the chance to faster indexing.

 

You need a good sitemap for google and a good navigation for your site for the users.

 

That couldn't be more wrong. Let me explain why.

First of all you need to know what we are talking about. If for example we talk about a new website with 3-4 pages, poor content, even with the best navigation links Google will not be able to index to much of it, because it couldn't "label" your website on a certain theme.

The more content you have the better "labeling" sorry for the term.

Secondly, a good navigation on a large website is a little tricky to deal with.
Imagine a website of at least 200 pages. How do you think the "crawler" will index faster, but keep your website compel to your visitors.

I can't see you planting 200 links on your homepage. And if you plan a 3-tier website (Google will often won't go deeper from Home page), you'll have to make a little math:

200 links / 10 (2-tier pages) = 20 links on each

Code (markup):

But the problem is that when a crawler visits your page it usually takes some milliseconds to few seconds to crawler as much as it can in that time.

So, assuming that, if the crawler takes on one of the 20 possible ways, it will crawler one 2-tier page as well as much time it allows the 3-tier subpages.

So it will need at least 20 visits to get the job done. I think you get the picture.

On the other hand, Google recommends you to have a sitemap for several reasons.

Besides, the space of a link to your sitemap, does not occupy a lot of space, and provides to the crawler everything it needs to know about your entire website in one place.

Not to mention you can add an XML website in which you can save a lot of crawlers work by labeling each and every page with:
- an importance factor;
- how often you think you'll update the page;
- what pages have been removed
etc...

And all of these in one place.

It is wrong to say that Google will not index your pages because you have a sitemap, because sometimes the crawler has THAT much time at its disposal. So, if you would not have a sitemap but a good navigation, it could even not index you at all.

The main 2 reasons why sitemaps were ever invented are:
- aid for your visitors;
- aid for SE crawlers.

So why avoid something that was created for this specific reason?

For me sounds like non-sense.

Cheers,

 

HAHAHA Do you really believe a "small site" with 50.000 pages do not need a sitemap?

Tell me one of the websites you visited that has 200 pages and you remember them all.

That was so funny. BTW, webpages with over 1 million pages are very VERY rare. So, what you're saying is: "It should only exist about a dozen sitemaps allover the Internet".

Thanks for a good laugh

 

I use sitemaps only if my site is based on Wordpress.. No specific reasons though. Just that the plugin is real ease

 

It's all about site architecture...

A very good and automated xml-sitemap creator (which Google loves ) can be found at XML-sitemaps.com a site specializing in sitemap software that generates XML, HTML and TXT sitemaps for webmasters to help get better crawling from search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!

Unfortunately it's free for your first 500 pages

 

Don't listen to everything someone else tells you. Of course having a sitemap helps you. Google says so themselves. End of discussion.

 

please keep the terrible advice to yourself

 

With or without sitemap will make no difference. But I believe it will have some influence in your indexing

 

i deleted my sitemap then my index number reduced from 3500 to 1000,i dont know why,maybe my site has little backlink.

 

Well I believe that "some influence" would be enough. Don't you think?

 

it will not boost your site or get your site onto the top but its a method to reconsider the pages when the bot comes to your site and it would take it as a backlink.

 

You can use a free sitemap service like Automaticsitemap 'dot' com. The free service only crawls and updates once a month. I came into this thread to decide if it is necessary to spend a few dollars (less than $30USD) to have my site crawled daily.

I run a Video Game news and review site with daily updates and a forum. Does daily sitemapping work with forum updates?

(Perhaps I just answered my own question)

 

Oh yeah,

I am also curious to know if anyone has seen any direct benefit from using an auto site map generator. Testimonials etc. I would preferrably like to hear from people who are not actually advertsing their own sitemapping service. LOL.

 

Still, it helps to create a sitemap or to automate creation of a sitemap. If you are using a Wordpress blog, then you can automate Sitemap creation through a plugin.