My 2 cents about Google Sitemaps...

I tried it out and didn't like it very much. It required me to get rid of my custom 404 page which is complete crap. When I had my sitemap up my indexed pages in google dropped from 8000+ to something in the 50's.

Another problem was that my site has more pages than what the sitemap generators would publish. I didn't want to pay for a program to generate a sitemap for me, and most of the free ones sucked or would only index up to a certain number.

Overall, I think I'm better off with my custom 404's without using Sitemaps.

//edit:
Although you can have your account set up and find out some basic stats about your site... like how your site shows up to certain key words without having to actually upload a site map... that part is kinda cool.

 

I don't believe site:domain.com really matters anymore. I have ~600 pages indexed, but I get more traffic from Google than I have ever before...

 

Custom 404's are not the issue, it's the way they were setup.

I see this often with the sites through my service and several of the sites that I developed before AutoMapIt came about. If you would like to PM me, I can help you with getting proper 404 error codes from your server and custom error pages. It takes a file upload that is a script that passes the proper HTTP status code, then displays your custom error page...

browser people see your custom page and spider bots see the proper error. I use custom 404's with Google sitemaps and it works flawlessly.