Do I need a sitemap?

sitemap advice needed

[davidlt]

I have a small website (under 10 pages, but will be adding)I switched from a "mother" site which I built online, to having it hosted.
Now Google doesn't find any of my pages, ecept for the domain. Google soesn't even recognize www.mysite.com/index.html. I think I was just spidered on 6/18 because my cache changed and it shows the new date which changed from 6/7 to 6/18.
Do I need a sitemap?
If so, where do I get one?
Every time I add a page, do I need to make changes to the sitemap?
Your help would be appreciated.
Dave
PS. How do I know when I have been crawled by other search engines?

[jay5r]

No, you don't need a sitemap... If you understand the concept of XML they're not hard to make, but it's not going to make THAT big of a difference for you.

Just make sure there are links out there pointing to your site and Google will eventually pick it up and index the whole site.

[davidlt]

Google has picked it up, but only the home page since I have a new host. How do I tell google to do a complete re-index?

[SonjaD]

You can't.

With the size of the Internet at this time it's not yet possible to index all pages, and keep them up to date, for a search engine. So they have to determine in which order they'll visit sites.

Apparently your old domain was found to have frequently changing and interesting content. Which is why everything was indexed. Of your own domain this hasn't been determined yet, so it is not that interesting to index yet.

If your frontpage has been indexed you can assume the rest of the pages will follow but it will take some time. Until that happens you should continue to build your site to make sure that when that searchengines start to visit there's something good to see!

[davidlt]

Thanks, now I understand. I can't easily change hosts or I will suffer the consequences, right?
And yes, I will try to build more pages.

[Quadrille]

Google is not concerned with changing hosts, but is concerned with changing URLs.

If you have a new domain.com, it will be a good while before you get the 'service' you are used to.

Meanwhile, keep building your site.

Are there links to your new domain? Is it listed in any directories? Inbound links are a key requirement for listing on Google.

For a very small, very new site, a sitemap won't make a lot of difference - but as the site grows, it will be increasingly important.

If you have the time, it's worth learning how they work and getting some practice in - a sitemap never did anyone any harm :)