In your Opinion...How important is having a Site Map of your Site for the Search Engines???
 

In your Opinion...How important is having a Site Map of your Site for the Search Engines???


Real Biz Question.
No "links pulled" responses plz.

Have it in xml format.

It is not important at all in 2011... just more usless extras for nothing... :2 cents:

I'm kind of feeling this way too...........

Its important, but you arent going to get kicked out of the search engines for not having it. It just makes googlebot's job easier.

The pages will get indexed regardless if they are linked, sitemaps help for things like google sitelinks [the results with categories under the main listing] and other advanced se features one might want to experiment with.

For the average site, as you say it may not be necessary.

not important at all unless you have a huge site with 10000s of pages and you want to make sure only a smaller number of most important pages gets priority, although google will still find and index all 10000s

Thanks for the great input people.

Its nice to see real biz on this site.

links pulled.

+1 for this

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

xml are imp for google, and make sure u have html sitemap as well , it helps for yahoo.
if the site is tube - u dont wanna miss google video traffic, so video sitemaps are also must.
good luck

I did my own test of two of my sites... What I found is that sitemaps don't make any difference what so ever. Both got indexed at the same pace. Both have similar search results. It didn't make any difference what so ever.

I also did a test with them on whether or not it was worth it to make sure duplicate content didn't show up on all pages. That didn't seem to do anything either... Google seems to know that blogs will have duplicate content on archive, category, tag, etc pages and doesn't seem to give two shits.

You can use the sitemap to have Google index and display in serp the categories rather than the tags for instance.

This is what I am thinking also.

Thanks for chiming in, V-R

:2 cents: I got same exact results with forums...

i think it does make your site stand out though in a google search as it sort of also lists the different part of your site.

I've never used it, and yet had many sites get 1P SERPS.

I am sure it can be helpful, but it seems to be little more than preference.

I put more concern with getting number 1 spot over how cool my result looks... but it does look nicer with the list for sure. My opinion is just keep your pages/sites with the least amount of extra "pick me pick me" bells and whistles and just make some good ass sites with original content and keep the sites nicely structured.

I'm no seo guru, I've never ever even read a seo book. I'm just going by my personal experiences while attempting to just make my pages load as fast as possible and get rid of uselss extra files on my servers... when I dropped analytics, meta keywords, meta descriptions, sitemaps, and all that extra shit... I was rewarded very nicely. :2 cents:

i add them on sites where i have lots of pages