Do Google sitemaps make a difference?

I've just submitted my first...

[roodle]

Hi,

I've just submitted my first sitemap and am eagerly awaiting some kind of result from my efforts. The reason I did one for the site in question is because it's a database-driven site which used to use "ID" as a parameter in the querystring, which I since changed, but I think the site is already in G's bad books. Hopefully things will change for the better now...?

Has anyone had any noticeable improvement in crawling/rankings after using a sitemap? (particularly for database-driven sites) Please share your experiences. Thanks.

[Eltiti]

On one of my sites (DB-driven with several parameters), several thousand pages that had previously not been crawled were crawled after I added a site map.

The pages are not ranking "well" yet, but since they didn't rank *at all* previously, I guess that's still an improvement! ;-)

[tebrino]

What script do you use to generate your sitemap?

[JoeHouse]

Question about google sitemap. If you submit your sitemap to google sitemap do you have to continually manually update them through google sitmap?

If you decided you do not want to submit anymore to google sitemap and let googlebots come and spider when they are ready, will they come on their own eventually or once you start with google sitemap do you have to continue to submit just to be indexed?

I would like to submit my sitemap to google but I also want google to spider my site on its own as well.

Is it possible to have the best of both worlds?

[europeforvisitors]

Question about google sitemap. If you submit your sitemap to google sitemap do you have to continually manually update them through google sitmap?

Not in my experience. I don't think the sitemap makes any difference at all if your site is already being crawled regularly and Googlebot doesn't have any trouble following your links.

[Eltiti]

What script do you use to generate your sitemap?

I've written a little program myself, in Delphi.

[roodle]

tebrino, I created the sitemap by exporting the mysql site database as an xml file and using that plus an asp script to write the sitemap. The <url> sections only contain <loc> and <changefreq> tags.

JoeHouse, there is an option to "remove" a sitemap in the Google sitemaps account, so I presume that means you can revert to just relying on Googlebot.

[JoeHouse]

Yes I still want Google to come and crawl as usual. I thought I just submit to get the ball rolling.

I was always told it is better if googl find you?

[tebrino]

Roodle, that's fantastic idea. Thank you very much.

[pcgamez]

Does anyone know if the sitemaps are useful for just making sure every page is indexed? I have a 100k+ page site. The pages that are essentially sitemaps do not index because of the URL variables. I believe most pages have been indexed over time, so would having the sitemap do any good? Or should i just wait for anything missing to eventually be crawled?

[edd1]

Is the sitemap feature designed for a site with 100k pages?

I am a fast writer but I'd struggle to consistently write 20 pages a day so that would take me 5000 days to write i.e. nearly 13 years.

Maybe you have lots of contributers or it's a huge forum etc. and that's great. But I'm not sure that's what sitemaps for - maybe I got the wrong idea.

[RockyB]

Eltiti, are you willing to share that program? If you are, please sticky me. I'm a budding Delphi developer too, and I'd quite like to have a look at how you've implemented it, if possible.

[pcgamez]

edd1, my site is essentially the imdb of books. That means it has many, many pages.

[anallawalla]

The G sitemap definitely makes a difference - got almost 500K pages indexed compared to <10K before.

Not seeing any more traffic or dramatic ranking improvements. Therefore, the *benefit* is yet to be seen.