Sitemaps - how long?

I create a sitemap and submitted it to Google. Google downloads my sitemap regularly, and shows no errors. However, no URLs from the sitemap are crawled by Googlebot whatsoever. Not even one! It's been nearly three weks. Am I doing something wrong? All sitemap validators I stumbled upon tell me that my sitemap is 100% valid.

 

My >3000-pages site has been up for months now, but its navigation was transparent to Google, so only the homepage was indexed. A month ago I changed the navigation to be crawler-friendly, and the new home page was picked up quickly and shows up in the Google cache, but Googlebot still crawls just my homepage every day or so. So two weeks ago I uploaded a complete sitemap, and now Googlebot crawls both my homepage and the sitemap every day or so ;-) I know I should wait, I'm simply frustrated.

 

It looks like after a month or so, my sites starts being crawled by Google page by page! It's still not shown in the SERPs, but it has been crawled. Looks like a good sign.

 

I had similar problems to you guys. I created a javascript navigation on my site and Google only crawled my main page. I created a Google Bot friendly HTML sitemap since it had basic crawlable <a href=""></a> Links. After a matter of weeks then Google finally crawled my inner pages.

 

How big can my Sitemap be?[/ur]l says no larger thn 10M or 50,000 links.

Maybe it just takes some time?

 

Well, for my sitemaps it took no longer than a few days before google started crawling pages, though the crawl rate was pretty low.

A sitemap alone won't get you very far, try to get some nifty links to your site, this will greatly speed up the process afaik.

 

I agree with TMan it may be possible for you to advertise your services or something from your site on Craigslist.

 

On googles TOS, it does say that the sitemap does not guarantee listings, it simply makes them aware of which pages are available. I've found it is good for dynamic pages or for pages that change regularly.

My experience was heavy spidering soon after submission and within a month or so, most of the pages showed up in the index.

 

I have heard alot about site maps and there benifits, however I dont think I need one because I have only 20 pages and have very good navigation. Google seems to crawl my whole site. Perhaps I should do one though, couldn't hurt.