Sitemaps: are these things worth the trouble?

[loner]

Anyone have any better luck just getting rid of these things? Seems my site has just gone the tubes since I started using them.

[Receptional Andy]

I rarely use sitemaps for relatively 'static' websites. I don't see the advantage since Google can find the content very quickly via links, and if there's a problem with the links, sitemap-discovered content is not going to set anyone's performance alight. A sitemap can actually hide any potential problems, and can create another maintenance overhead, even if generated automatically.

If you have fair amounts of topical content, that need to be retrievable in results as quickly as possible, then I think there's an argument for sitemap use. And of course, they're required for Google News and the like.

As for removing sitemaps, from memory there were various reports of problems occurring after removing sitemaps, but that was some time ago, and I believe Google said that those problems were fixed.

[internetheaven]

Sitemaps are really for new sites, sites with bad (or overly complicated) internal linking structures or a site that is missing things like a decent number of inbound links to it.

You can test to see if you need the sitemap anymore by NOT updating your sitemap when you add a new page to the site and seeing how long it takes Google to get a hold of it. Currently Google is getting my changes/additions in generally under 24 hours - there is no need for a sitemap.

But a sitemap should not, and as far as I'm aware DOES NOT, affect ranking in any way.

Be very aware of co-incidences. I just made a huge change to some meta tags across one of my sites and the following day traffic doubled to that site. If I were a newbie webmaster I would probably have come running to this board and posted that "Changing X meta tag can double your traffic!" - when the truth is that it is probably just a co-incidence that there was a ranking update for my site the day after I made the changes and the traffic change would have occured anyway.

[Shaddows]

Yah, but doubling trafic is BIG (unless it was small before). Care to share what you did with your metas?

Can't add anything to the Sitemap debate- we don't use them, but then we get spidered quickly, and have a clear hierarchy anyway.

[internetheaven]

we don't use them, but then we get spidered quickly, and have a clear hierarchy anyway.

Even Google's webmaster tools section talks about long URls and flash/javascript navigation as being good reasons to use upload a sitemap. It seems to have turned into some sort of worry for webmasters ... like filing your tax returns ... (though I'm willing to bet more webmasters upload sitemaps than file tax returns)

[rainborick]

I've been able to improve the performance of one of my sites over the past year and I believe that the XML sitemap played a part. For example, I had to rename several directories over the weekend, which caused about 60% of the 400+ URLs on this site to change. Once I updated the sitemap, Google began to crawl the new URLs and has completed about half the job. These were new crawls, not redirects from the original URLs. Google has only encountered about 3% of the redirects so far. Considering this is a site with pretty low PR and whose content hasn't been changing much for the past 6-7 months, I was very happy to see this response. One factor that may be important is that I've been keeping the modification dates accurate and not including the change frequency field at all.