Site Map Importance

[baglady]

Hi
How important is submitting a site map to google webmaster, will it really help with website ranking

 

[louie]

Website ranking depends more on incoming links and anchor text, while sitemap helps SE find deep pages on your website easier than just following links available on the page itself...

 

[nevf]

It helped me before. Had a B&B website that i was working on, in Westport (massive competition). The Site Map that I made and submitted to Google, made the website jump from the bottom of page 2 to the middle of page 1 in Google. So whilst it doesn't matter that much, it still matters.

 

[baglady]

Hi nevf

Thanks for letting me know, thats a big big difference in google rankings. I will give it a try.

thanks
B

 

[Hafsoh]

Submitting sitemaps ensure that bot can have all the links at a time and can crawl according to the links, you can set changing/update frequency in your sitemap.

 

[paul]

Sitemaps won't help your rankings, but can help your indexing to be more efficient. In the sitemap protocol you can assign importance to pages, from 0.0 to 1.0 , I've seen that Google tends to visit my higher scored pages more frequently.

 

[Cormac]

There is more of a benefit to be gained from sitemaps for larger more complex sites that have many directories and many pages of content.

For a smaller site of few pages which isn't updated too often, the benefits of sitemaps aren't too great but they still aid spidering.

Just don't expect the sitemap.xml file to be your saviour.

 

[trelog]

I find that google takes a long time going trough all my links in my sitemap, dont know if it really helps getting sites indexed really. But like stated above, its only necessary to add a sitemap if you have many pages on your site/blog. And it wont effect SERP rankings at all.

 

[blue4ever]

I am about to promote a site - its an information based site only - thus its only a few pages - 7 in total.

I appreciate the importance, generally, but with so few pages, its a little, well, embarrassing.

It would actually seem patronising to anyone looking at the site – any thoughts

 

[Interleado]

it can be useful to have both html and xml sitemap.

on the html sitemap you can include keywords in the links to the pages