Is submitting Sitemaps more effective than submitting indexpage?

[haryanto]

If there is only one choice,is it better to just submit the sitemap page than the index page to search engines?
Sitemap covers more links to pages so that we can ensure most or not all of the pages in the site is spidered. Index.htm might not cover as much ground as sitemap. Sitemap short circuited the path spiders take to get to the site which is a good thing lest the spider got lost in the jungle of pages in your site.

[Macguru]

Hi haryanto,

Welcome to WmW!

Submitting sitemaps is a good idea, especially for perticuliar bots who dont go very deep in site structure.

But I think Google dont give much attention to submitted pages.

Good rules of thumb would be to :

A link sitemap from homepage
B leave sitemap at root level of the site

[haryanto]

Hi Mac Guru,

Is it really important to have sitemap at the root? I have my sitemap one level deel at /pages/sitemap.htm

Is it a big difference?

[Abrexa_UK]

I think that Google is possibly giving a PR0 to sitemaps now. I have seen this on a couple of clients' sites where the sitemap had a very high ratio of links to real text. The PR0 does not apply to any other areas of their sites (and the sitemaps are properly linked to).

The solution is presumably to ensure that all pages exist in the normal site hierarchy and can thus gain their PR in the normal manner, and aren't dependent upon the sitemap.

Another solution is to simply add a reasonable amount of text to the sitemap. However, I presume that Google are trying to remove sitemaps from their SERPs, so this isn't necessarily a useful thing to do.

[Macguru]

>>Is it really important to have sitemap at the root?

Not that important, if linked from the home page. But you can keep this in mind for future sites.

While I see no solid evidence that "that Google is possibly giving a PR0 to sitemaps now", Abrexa_UK is right about trying to keep text to links ratio sensibly balanced in site maps. A good link description in text wont hurt anyone.

Google will index more pages of your site if you improve PR sitewide. Google is one of the best SE for finding pages in sites. It is picky about wich one it does include in the index. Sitemaps will help for other SE that will not crawl very deep in sites.