Google Sitemaps - Hidden Pages

Will these pages get ranked?

[irldonalb]

Hi,

I have created a list of pages that I don't have links to them from anywhere. These page exist and can only be found on my site via search forms. I want to get these pages indexed.

If i submit them to Google in the XML Sitemap should they get indexed?

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Donal

[Robert Charlton]

Regardless of what Google Sitemaps does...

With any search form driven site, if you want these pages to rank, you need to create a series of site-maps on your site that link to the urls of the pages you want found. How you distribute your PageRank among these pages is important.

My suggestion also is not to link to every subtle variant of these pages, but rather to choose the core variants that are likely to be searched, so you're not splitting your PageRank among too many pages.

[irldonalb]

Thanks for your feedback Robert. To be honest, the its slightly more complicated than what I first said. I tried to simplify the example.

The site in question is an ecommerce website. About a year ago they launched a German version on the same domain. Against my wishes, there is a link to the German site and this saves a cookie that sets the language. Users then browser the site on the same URL structure as the English version. Obviously this is causing confusion with Search Engines and the German version is not getting ranked.

I recently realised that if I add &lang=de to any URL it sets the cookie & loads the German version. Therefore my plan was to take a copy of the site URLs and add &lang-de to each URL and submit them in an XML sitemap.

Its stupid I know but I can't get them to change the way the cookie is set or change all the links on the German site, so I'm clutching at straws with this idea.

Thanks
Donal