Is sitemap is necessary?

zinnerz · PR0 Joined: 08 Jun 2006 Posts: 75

Dear all,

Maybe this is a dumb question, but what is the benefit using sitemap?

I've seen that all of my website have been listed and cached very well on main search engine even I'm not using sitemap.

mhmdkhamis · PR4 Joined: 26 Nov 2006 Posts: 436 Location: egypt

i think sitemap important to big sites which have many pages and links

if google take all your topics i (think) its not necessary

but should be if u have sitemap its good Smile

HB · phpBB SEO Team Joined: 16 Oct 2006 Posts: 794

Search engines are smart enough to crawl your site, but sitemaps give them hints to do it more efficiently. The added bonus, thanks to google webmaster tools, is an accurate accounting of what google found in your sitemap (# of URLs processed). I've used that as a quick sanity check.

I recently upgraded to the latest Google Yahoo MSN Sitemaps (GYM). One feature you don't read much about is its XML style sheet that transforms the sitemap format into a nice browseable format. Why should that matter? It's handy if you've installed one of the URL rewriting mods and want to scan for oddies in the generated titles. Some users, for example, might have meaningless titles (e.g., "HELP@?!?!" instead of "phpBB database restore fails!") that merit attention.

So do you need it? Technically, no. Do savvy webmasters want it? Definitely.

ultimatehandyman · PR2 Joined: 15 Mar 2007 Posts: 205

I have a sitemap for my main site, but I have a directory on a subdomain that does not have a sitemap and the directory is very well indexed by google, despite not having a sitemap.

The directory is powered by php link directory and I think one of the reasons whey it is so well indexed is because the software makes everything search engine friendly.

dcz · Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 10:17 am Post subject: Re: Is sitemap is necessary?

phpLD, at least V 3.x does generate Google sitemaps.

Then for sure, search engine optimizing is all about doing better than what we already have, it does not mean nothing is possible without it.

phpBB.com is very well indexed and ranked, despite SIDs and no Google sitemaps, but, I don't know how much webmaster would be ready to wait until they have a PR9 to get there.

Like you, we do no run sitemaps for our directories and they are fully indexed. Running a sitemap for the forum only would not jeopardize this in any way.

Google sitemaps does help out a lot bots to crawl your site more efficiently, meaning less visits needed to cache more pages. It's really helping out to dig out old links and to have fresh content discovered faster, and this can really make a difference, especially for an active board.

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acapellas4u · Posted: Sat Jul 28, 2007 4:23 pm Post subject: Re: Is sitemap is necessary?

Could one of you chiefs confirm if Google's doing a good enough job of indexing my site (site URL in sig).

I remember looking @ sitemaps but I can't recall IF Im actually using one :S.

Regards.

dcz · Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 2:29 pm Post subject: Re: Is sitemap is necessary?

Well, you could do better for sure : http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.acapellas4u.co.uk

You have many postxx.html urls cached, and they are all duplicate (up to 15 per topic page), and you do not have a title per page.

The very first SEO principle to follow being one page, one title, one url, you'd probably have better results with the zero duplicate, the title optimisation mod and GYM sitemaps.

Google sitemaps really helps the bots to efficiently crawl a web site. They do not need as many useless visits just to find out the 25th duplicate of the same page.
With thousand of url listed, the total amount of time to crawl all your page do start to matters, since SEs do not have an infinite amount of crawling time for each site. Better targeting the crawl and thus the page caching is a really interesting optimization IMHO.

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