Sitemaps good or bad

[alexo]

I have been experimenting with Google sitemaps for 3 months now and have seen my numbers go down since using the sitemaps. Also, my new pages have not been getting indexed by Google. These new pages were not being indexed before I started using Google sitemaps, this is the main reason that I started using Google sitemaps. Why are the sitemaps not helping me?

This brings me to my main question, Google sitemaps good or bad?

 

[apexad]

for me i like a1 site mapper
http://www.micro-sys.dk/products/sitemap-generator/


i like the deep crawling of folders in your directory and can generate .xml, or even .csv or .htm sitemap and also best specified for google sitemaps protocol.

Thanks for this, I will have to try it!

 

[Keral_Patel]

Below are the two free ones.

http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com - Free if one site. More then one site requires Premium account.
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com - Free for site with less then 500 pages. If your site is more then 500 pages then it will make the sitemap of the first 500 pages it crawls.

 

[kwan]

I bought the www.xml-sitemaps.com one. It works fairly simple. Just copy the sitemap folder to every new website and run it to create the sitemaps (3 types: html, Yahoo and Google) or you can schedule it in a cronjob to update regularly.

I submit the sitemaps to Yahoo but not to Google. It tried it with a forum that google only indexed about 1,000 of the 60,000 posts after 1 year but it didn't help. Yahoo on the other hand indexed all 20,000 pages in 3 weeks from a brand new website. I don't know if it was because of the sitemap but it doesn't hurt either.

 

[liquidcherry]

hey guys, here is a freeware proggie:

http://gsitecrawler.com/

Didn't try it my own, but it's free

Frank

 

[Amnezia]

If you use it properly, a sitemap is beneficial. Especially now that Google, Yahoo and MSN have initiated the standardized sitemap. It is intended to help the search engines accurately index all the pages on your site. It DOES affect the crawl rate. It does NOT cut your pagerank in half. It has no affect on PR.

It doesn't increase the crawl rate at all. It just increases the chances of getting more urls indexed.

 

[ennui]

I have been experimenting with Google sitemaps for 3 months now and have seen my numbers go down since using the sitemaps. Also, my new pages have not been getting indexed by Google. These new pages were not being indexed before I started using Google sitemaps, this is the main reason that I started using Google sitemaps. Why are the sitemaps not helping me?

This brings me to my main question, Google sitemaps good or bad?

What number have gone down? Your mean PR? Aren't there any other factors that may have influenced your PR?No updated content for a long time? Have stopped link-building? Sitemaps can't be blamed for that, I'm sure.

 

[john's TLD Domain]

Search engines have a hard time indexing pages more than 3 clicks deep. Even with a Sitemap. you should also know that creating to many pages at once can also stop you from getting indexed. if you create new pages you should use backlinks to your new pages. So don't create 150 new pages in like 2 days. or if you do make sure each page gets at least a backlink or 2. this will help you.

 

[Keral_Patel]

Search engines have a hard time indexing pages more than 3 clicks deep. Even with a Sitemap. you should also know that creating to many pages at once can also stop you from getting indexed. if you create new pages you should use backlinks to your new pages. So don't create 150 new pages in like 2 days. or if you do make sure each page gets at least a backlink or 2. this will help you.

I just made 1000 new pages yesterday on my site http://www.downzine.com

Also added a files information section in it which has new content and new pages. But my internal linking structure is good enough

If I go on getting 2 backlinks for each page from other websites to it. then I will have to spend 10 lifetimes in doing so. As some of my websites has more then 150,000 pages and 600,000 pages.

 

[Squeaky]

In the past 10 tens I haven't used site maps at all. In the last 3 months I started using site maps in my directories and it has made a big difference of how many pages get indexed by Google and Yahoo.
I would say it has made about a 30% more pages in those two search engines.

 

[Skip]

I figured Google's sitemap would help tell the googlebot where all your pages are for ease indexing.