Site Maps

How much notice do the spiders take of site maps?

[allybongo]

I have a medium sized site and was thinking of creating a page with links to every page on my site, not sure if this will help me increase my ratings or not? Any ideas?

[chris_f]

A site map should do nothing do your ratings on a static site. If it's a dynamic site you can do clever things to boost you PR. Generally a site map is useful to ensure that a spider finds all of you pages with ease.

Advice: Try to add a small piece of text (about 5 words) to each link. Ensure that it is not link text (anchor text).

Chris

[cohwill]

I do not know if it will boost your rankings, but it will help the search engines in indexing your site and make it much more user-friendly. Especially if it is a big site.

[chris_f]

What I meant about boosting the ranking is the following:

If part of your site contains a long querystring then there might be room to shorten it in the site map the boost a pages PR without affecting the functionality of the site.

This has worked.

[allybongo]

thanks everyone for that. Its a nightmare of a site to optimise. Full of javascript, and its in frames, how could they...