I am highly skeptical about the usefulness of XML sitemaps.
My suspicion about sitemaps is that they were primarily created by Google to debug Googlebot. When webmasters submit a sitemap, they tell Google what pages are supposed to be on the site. Google’s engineers can compare that data with the data from Googlebot crawls. Then Google can use that data to improve Googlebot. The Webmaster Tools are the carrot on the stick to get you to add a sitemap (but you don’t need the sitemap to get the carrot).
You can put a totally incorrect XML sitemap on a Web site and Google will not start de-indexing your site or lowering your rankings.
I just found a video where Vanessa Fox talks about sitemaps:
“It’s really not about the ranking; it’s more about crawling… Sitemaps doesn’t impact your ranking at all.
The only way it impacts ranking is that in it helps in that very first obstacle of learning about all your pages because if we don’t about them we won’t index them and we won’t rank them. But other than that it has no impact on ranking.”
So as long as Google can index your pages (which it should be able to do if you have built your site correctly), sitemaps should not be needed.
I think there is also a common misconception about the <priority> element in XML sitemaps. It doesn’t tell search engines how important your pages are in the overall Web; it only tells them how important your pages are in relation to each other. So if you give all your pages a priority of 0.5 it is the same thing as giving all of your page the priority of 1 (the highest number allowed). More info about that in the specification.
Does anyone have any data that shows that sitemaps have any use on sites that are already getting indexed well? I am highly skeptical of their usefulness and think that the time spent on them could be used for more effective tasks.
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I have not submitted a full-fledged site map, but there is a way to get your site spidered by Google quickly and easily, at least once a week. My site is spidered daily, actually, I think because I have an RSS feed at it.
In your free GMAIL account, there are various free tools, and one of the tabs, Webmaster, has a way to VERIFY your domain with Google by putting a small piece of code in the metatag on your homepage.(Look on the top left when you are logged in to gmail and choose account if you want to see a full list of all the things Google offers for free within Gmail. One you get to the next screen you will see an icon that looks like a group og computers in various colors.)
Once you verify your account that, you start getting great reports on what people are not only searching for, but clicking through on, the top 20 for each, and what you rank on for each of these terms as well.
It also shows all your internal and external links, pages, and most important keywords. It also shows me the exact date and time since I was last spidered.
It is a completely free tool. Ever since I started using it about a year ago, it has been getting better. Now gives more and more reports, most of which you can download as CSV files.
It gives you the knowledge of what people are REALLY searching for, and what is bringing them to your site. You can break it down per country as well, and they will be adding countries as they get their new offices set up in China, Singapore and Australia. They also have mobile search as well, so as I said, the kinds of reports they are adding help me to create more product that I know people are interested in.
It is easy to use and so I would recommend anyone set up a free gmail account, grab the code, put it on their homepage in the metatag (the instructions are very clear) and once the account is verified, the results will start coming in.
I agree about the RSS (or ATOM) feeds being useful, especially if you ping blog services right after adding new content.
The Webmaster Tools are great — you can use them even if you don’t have a Gmail account by going to http://www.google.com/webmasters/
The sitemap helps get all of your pages indexed but not rankings unless you correctly SEO’d your website. That will make the difference.
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