Quote:
Originally Posted by DamageX
Elaborate, please. Doesn't make much sense to me, without further info on this.
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Just very painful personal experiences. Sitemaps are just good for getting a large site crawled quicker, plus they avoid pages getting lost due to a bad/broken linking structure, but there are several disadvantages:
1. You need to use real 404 pages, redirects aren't possible any more since you need to report a 404 and not a 200.
2. Sitemaps do not help your site except for being crawled better. If you have an established well linked site, there is no need for a sitemap at all.
3. Adding sitemaps to your google account allows google to see which sites you are running, even if you use different IPs. Since almost all adult sites are "thin affiliates" by google's terms, getting one of them banned would mean you get the others kicked as well.
I lost a part of a network because of this. One site was kicked, all other sites in the google account followed. Those not added in the account stayed in google. Bad coincidence ? I don't think so, 11 sites from the network were kicked, 23 stayed and the 11 were those in the google account.
4. By giving pages a certain importance, your suggestions compete with google's internal evaluation. It really messes with your rankings, seen it happen more than once.
Don't get me wrong, if you want to use a old style html sitemap, fine, but the XML ones are a big NO NO except on a new or badly linked site. If a site is built and linked well, there are zero advantages of a xml sitemap. So, why use one ?