Google Site Map

[Ravenfire]

I was just wondering how many of you have set this up? Also, will it really benefit my site? Sorry I dont know a great deal about it and tbh when I initially had a quick look thought that it didnt look particularly straight forward!

I tried to direct it to the mambo site map and it came up with a parsing error so if anyone has any advice on that I would be grateful.

Many Thanks

Toni

[Richard Conyard]

As far as I can tell unless you have a huge site that Google is having problems getting around it's not going to provide many benefits.

I've put together a plugin for my CMS that automatically generates google sitemaps, but to be honest I see it more as a gizmo rather than a solid feature.

[Rob Holmes]

I've never tried it but understand it is said to be of benefit if you update your site alot.

BUT on the flipside I was also under the impression that Google has slowed down indexing of pages and sites and regular updates have slowed to quite a few weeks in between the sites being spidered - so I don't know why they want more work, maybe eventually (if trials work out) they'll use the sitemap system for updating their results rather than the slower spider. Who knows!

Rob

[Enigma121]

We use sitemap, as we are regularly updating our content (website owners really should be doing this).

As a result, you can edit your sitemap, resubmit it, and google will trawl the new content within a matter of hours.

It won't improve your ranking, but might increase the accuracy of your listing - meaning your new content gets noticed quickly.

[epiphany]

If your site is properly constructed you shouldn't need a Google site map. If your site has all the pages of the site available within 3 clicks of the homepage then in my opinion forget about using Google site map.

[Ravenfire]

Thanks for the answers. Im not going to bother with this then as I dont think it will really benefit my site.

[c2webdesign]

Sitemaps can be useful, but it does depend on how easy your site can be navigated (and spider), whether you have simple text navigation - or fancy javascript rollovers etc... and how many pages.

A sitemap doesn't need to be over complicated, and if you have many pages controlled by scripts it can be relatively easy (for a designer) to add a script to capture many of the pages cuttong down on the work involved.

If all your pages (and product) can be accessed from the home page via one simple text link then you will probably not need one. If not you may want to think about it.

Tendancies have shown that visitors have started using Sitemaps on more 'complicated' sites - just the same as you would use the index on an Argos catalogue.

Also by search engines being able to find, and index all your pages, from one simple page it can often open your pages up to more keywords for the individual pages.

Dean
C2 Web Design
http://www.c2webdesign.co.uk

Web Design | Online Marketing | Search Engine Optimisation

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[Richard Conyard]

c2 - We're on about google sitemaps (it's their way of allowing their spider get around large sites easier).

Adding my 2p worth, reading their material for a vast majority of users it wont help. Provided the links in your site can be trawlled (site:www.yoursite.com - at google to see), it wont help at all.

[c2webdesign]

Sorry guys, that will teach me to look properly before I leap

Hope it helped someone anyway.

Dean