To sitmap or not to sitemap

[newstart]

Im debating wether to submit a sitemap to google, IVe read somewhere this can have a negative effect but at the minute Google isnt showing up my site at all, its a small site for a holiday cottage.

Thanks

 

[Matt Gent]

Have you tried site://yourdomain.co.uk ?
If it shows your pages your atleast indexed.

 

[royalexile]

I've not heard of submitting a sitemap to Google as being a negative thing to do. I'd be interested to see where you saw that.

I've always thought it important to submit a sitemap as it's a great way of informing Google of new pages (although I know if they are linked correctly they'd be picked up anyway!)

 

[Experienced IT guy]

First: have you google analytics installed? If not do so, it forces Google to scan your site.

Second have you pages where there are mutiple routes or no routes (links) to the pages not indexed?

No routes men the spider will not get to the page, and neither will a reader.

Multiple routes mean you have some sort of content management system where a page is refered to as mysite ? 123 which is very unfiendly for google indexing spiders/

 

[newstart]

yes got analytics going this evening and an xml sitemap and if i do a deliberate search for my site It shows my external links page but that's it, it isn't comeing up in a search such as holiday cottage Tyrone for example.

Thanks

 

[OldWelshGuy]

if all your pages are indexed, then you don't need a sitemap.

 

[GoingOnline]

Hello!

Create an account with Google Webmaster tools, you can see there if/which ones of your pages are indexed, or if there was any error crawling. A sitemap makes things easier for big sites and it doesn't hurt, but if your pages aren't accessible because of robots.txt issues or something else Google won't find them anyway.

Also, a sitemap is no guarantee Google is going to index your site, though my last launch has been live for less than a month and has everything on the index just fine (less than 50 pages, more than 25)

 

[GoingOnline]

yes got analytics going this evening and an xml sitemap and if i do a deliberate search for my site It shows my external links page but that's it, it isn't comeing up in a search such as holiday cottage Tyrone for example.

Thanks

It takes time to rank for keywords, and incoming links from other sites, on site SEO optimization, etc...

There's about About 3,570,000 results for that specific search phrase so you may want to look at longer keywords, read a lot about SEO or hire a SEO company to do it for you

 

[cheaptents]

Sitemaps are a door to your website, there is no reason not to offer one really and several reason to why you should - such as you giving search engines a hand in prioritising content on your website - the higher the priority the quicker it's indexed and more likely it is to rank well (though this will of course be subject to many other factors.)

 

[fisicx]

Sitemaps are a door to your website, there is no reason not to offer one really and several reason to why you should - such as you giving search engines a hand in prioritising content on your website - the higher the priority the quicker it's indexed and more likely it is to rank well (though this will of course be subject to many other factors.)

The opposite is true.

There are many reasons NOT to use a sitemap. Get it wrong and your ranking can suffer. If the site is alread in the index then you don't need a sitemap (as OWG already said).

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184&from=40318&rd=1

 

[cheaptents]

OK ranking can suffer if you get it wrong, but it's pretty hard to mess it up in my experience.

Sitemaps give you some control ... just because it is indexed doesn't mean google knows what you give priority too - and this is a factor people can overlook somewhat.

I disagree with anyone who says don't have a sitemap - unless you have a website of 4 or 5 pages I advise it as a must - a lot of smaller spiders (such as some directory spiders) rely on them in the first place to check the size of your site, see how fresh content is and where to start indexing (aka which page is the most important to index).

 

[sean.browne]

I can't think of a reason not to have one, except maybe the tinme taken to create upload.

"In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it"

from http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184&from=40318&rd=1

Obviously, I am talking about a proper, working Sitemap not one that is incorrect in any way.

 

[fisicx]

OK ranking can suffer if you get it wrong, but it's pretty hard to mess it up in my experience.

It's very easy to mess it up.

If a site is already in the index and ranked and you set up a sitemap with the standard 0.5 importance settings there is plenty of evidence that your ranking will suffer.

If you have a new site and set up a standard sitemap then you probably won't rank as well as you could.

Google might say you won't be penalised but this isn't the case. I set up a default sitemap on a site with 500+ pages a while back. Within days ranking plummeted. I removed the sitemap and I popped back onto page 1.

You could of course set the importance to 1 on every page but that means all your internal linking structure ( a key ranking feature) is ignored and Google treats every page the same.

If you want to set up a sitemap then do so. I just wouldn't recommend it unless G is struggling with your site.

 

[cheaptents]

not being funny here but if you set all your pages to the same priority it will always suffer - that is not what priority is for nor should it be used like that.

Ok let me go back a step - it is easy to mess up if you don't know what you are doing
if you've done some research its pretty hard to screw up

Also I must say I am not saying that all product pages shouldn't be ranked 0.8 or that similar pages can't have the same rank what I am saying is that your whole website shouldnt just be priority 1 < this is just a dumb idea and why you suffered I guess.

 

[davek17]

Hi There

This is what I have found when we sitemapped! We sitemapped our site using an application and it was all nice and lovely! However as we added new products form the backend and thus new dynamically created pages and categories we didn't sitemap and this seemed to give us issues with some pages indexing in Google.

Once we pinged the pages or resubmitted a site map with them in it, things were fine in a matter of days but it did seem to have a big effect on our SEO for these pages.

So in this sense I would always try and keep up to date on your sitemap.

Google does not like dead klinks however so if you take pages away regularly and do not update your sitemap then you could be sending the spiders to pages that do not exist. I'm not 100% sure about (who is with anything Google related!) but I imagine it would be something you have to be careful of.