Sitemap - change it every time I add a page?

[aj113]

If I add new pages to my site, but I don't resubmit a new sitemap, will G still index the new pages?

[Brett_Tabke]

yes. a sitemap is not needed at all.

[aj113]

Thank you Brett, I guess that then raises the question; what purpose does a sitemap serve?

[Achernar]

You can update your sitemap. You don't need to submit it each time it has changed.

[aj113]

Thank you Achenar, just to clarify, are you saying that after publishing new pages I simply create a new sitemap and don't tell Google about it?

[Achernar]

You re-use the same sitemap. Again and again. Adding new pages to the list. Google (and yahoo) will fetch the sitemap regularly.
In fact, with the recent addition of the "Sitemap:" line in robots.txt, you don't even need to submit your sitemaps anymore. The last advantages being that google webmaster tools warns you about errors, and gives you some statistics.

[Receptional Andy]

Thank you Achenar, just to clarify, are you saying that after publishing new pages I simply create a new sitemap and don't tell Google about it?

Or don't publish a sitemap at all. If your pages are linked appropriately then a sitemap is not necessary to just get pages indexed.

[Achernar]

Or don't publish a sitemap at all. If your pages are linked appropriately then a sitemap is not necessary to just get pages indexed.

It's indexed (or at least spidered) faster. ;)

[Receptional Andy]

It's indexed (or at least spidered) faster.

Not necessarily it isn't :P

[Achernar]

I talk about my own experience. :)

[ecmedia]

A sitemap makes sense for websites that have a lot of user generated content (users most often do not link as well as a website owner would). For instance, we recently launched a myspace like community on our website and pages are being added so fast and are often not linked well that the sitemap has really helped.

[Johan007]

Pages are indexed (or at least spidered) quicker however they carry no weight because link analysis has not been carried out yet so there is no SEO benefit because your page will be too low in the rankings.

A sitemap only helps Google and your server load not your SEO. If your manually adding URL's to your site map your waisting your time, I think it is only worth doing via the database in a sitemap.asp or sitemap.php way.

[edited by: Johan007 at 4:21 pm (utc) on Feb. 21, 2008]

[aj113]

Great responses thanks. I wrote in an earlier thread that after re-submitting a sitemap my indexed pages dropped dramatically. This was on 12/2/08 and they still haven't come back.

My site is basically articles and I'm always careful to ensure that all of the articles are linked to each other throughout the site.

On that basis I think I would be just as well ditching the site map altogether after reading all of your posts. I have no problem with Googlebot crawling my site, it visits every day. In addition the sitemap stats in G Webmaster Tools shows that G is aware of ALL the urls in the sitemap, and yet still they are not all indexed.

[webdude]

I use sitemaps to just list main categories and sections of one of my sites. This site has a forum with over 75,000 posts with multiple pages and a directory that is updated daily with many more pages. To update the sitemap at this rate would be pretty much impossible. All categories in the directory are in the sitemap, all main forum pages are in the sitemap and all main pages on the site are in sitemap. Sitemap has approximatley 150 links in it, yet a site: search in Google pulls up 20,000 pages. I kind of use site map as a director to get to the actual individual notes being played.

Does that make sense?