indexing/sitemap

crawling status

[AMHarris]

I found out that my web server is not an ordinary web hosting company, and so their FTP situation does not allow me to create a sitemap or an account to make a sitemap, because when doing so it wants you to enter your hosting FTP account name and such, and currently they're not setup to accomadate that.

So my question is is a sitemap crucial to have, because I've checked my crawl status and currently only my homepage is being crawled and not my inner important pages.
Will the crawler eventually get to those, like follow all my inside links to my pages or is a sitemap required to tell Google or whoever all the pages I have in my website?

[Marshall]

First, welcome to WebmasterWorld AM Harris.

There are two kinds of site maps: for bots and for (primarily) humans. If your web address is www.whatever.com, creating either should not be a problem. You can manually create an XML site map and upload it yourself, or use any of the free services that crawl your site and create a site map for you to upload.

The second, primarily human site map, is an html page which contains simple text links to all your pages without any bells and whistles. This has two advantages: first it is good for accessibility issues, especially if your navigation involves scripting, and second, it can be spidered by bots. This too can manually be created, uploaded to your site and, of course, have a link on your home page to the site map. You can also use the human site map to add a few keywords to links, eg:

<a href="widgets">Widgets</a> - Includes blue widgets, red widgets, specialty widgets, (etc).

This has obvious SEO benefits. However, I guess this does not answer the primary question - do you need it. No, but it helps.

Marshall