Wordpress Sitemap Generator and Google Webmaster Account relationship

Does your Google Webmaster account have anything to do with this?

[lloydshanks]

I just installed the Google Sitemap Generator created by this guy:

[arnebrachhold.de...]

It installed easy enough and it said "Google has now been notified". I could easily walk away from this and assume that Google will go and grab my xml file, but I recall in the Google Webmaster account, you have to log in and either upload your sitemap or some how notify them that you have a sitemap in your root directory.

Since I installed this plugin with out doing anything to my Google webmaster account, does this plugin really do anything at all? Or has Google changed the way it receives sitemaps? Do you not need a Webmaster's account anymore?

Anyone know anything about this?
Thanks!

[ergophobe]

You can submit a sitemap either from your GWT account or by pinging the google server

[google.com...]

[lloydshanks]

My question has more to do with this Wordpress Plugin. No where in the instructions of this plugin or on this guy's site (the author of the plugin) does it mention that you need to have a Google's webmaster account. I just happen to know about the Google webmaster account and the sitemap feature inside of it.

My question is: does just having a sitemap.xml file in your root directory and notifying Google of it, enough to get your sitemap noticed by Google? without having a Google Webmaster's account to begin with?

[ergophobe]

Check. I understood the question. That page I gave you answers it. When the plugin says that Google was notified, it means it was pinged. No GWT account required for that.

Of course, if you don't manage your sitemap via GWT you lose pretty much all benefit and get all the downsides.

The downside: having a sitemap takes away an important diagnostic tool for your site. You no longer can tell if your pages would show up on a natural crawl or if Google has them indexed merely because of the sitemap, but otherwise wouldn't have them. If that's the case, the page won't rank. If Google can't find your page via natural crawl, that means there are no inbound links, which means it will rank for almost nothing and nobody can find it anyway because there are no inbounds (unless, as may be the case sometimes, the page is available via site search and that is a primary navigation method for, say, a very large product catalog or knowledge base).

If you are lazy (i.e. like me), you aren't checking your logs of google crawls that carefully, so the data isn't that useful and therefore there's no significant downside to sitemaps. Still, if you have decent navigation, there's no particular upside either. Again, if SEs won't crawl deep enough to find your pages, they likely won't rank for anything anyway.

But without GWT there's no upside to a sitemap. The best part of GWT is the diagnostics (crawl problems, inbounds, search terms you rank for, etc).