sitemap.xml

is it needed?

[meelosh]

This might be a stupid question but these days it is getting very confusing as what to do and not to do in order to not upset or confuse "G". i have always used xml sitemap files in order to help the search engines a little. one of my sites is being well crawled and is well indexed but it is proving to be too much trouble to maintain the sitemap as we are adding allot of new content and have removed allot of old content and we are dealing with allot of redirects....so sometimes "g" finds urls in the sitemap that should not be there as we have not done the redirect yet......i want to stop using the sitemap.xml and let the search engines crawl the site by themselves....if i remove the sitemap will this confuse or upset google in anyway or would it be recomended to rather spend more time updating the file.
thanks

[maximillianos]

They way I think it could "hurt" you is if it was helping G find more of your pages, and now they won't be able to use that tool to find your pages.

Just think of it as another tool they can use to find stuff on your site. If you never had one, it can't hurt to add one. If you always had one, it could hurt to remove it from the perspective of making the bots life more difficult (ie - forcing it to crawl and find new content versus just finding it in your sitemap and going from there).

We automated the creation of our sitemaps, they get updated nightly and we never have to touch them. I would look for a way to automate them so you can have the best of both worlds...

[meelosh]

thanks max...i figured as much and will continue as to make it easier for old man "g"
any advice on automating the sitemap file not quite sure how.
thanks for getting back

[maximillianos]

What we did was setup a few different sitemaps for the various sections of our site, all linked to in the one master sitemap.xml file.

Then we created a perl script that basically listed our pages out in a flatfile. Each morning the program runs and appends any new content from the previous day to the flatfiles. That is pretty much it.

The sitemaps grow on their own and it obviously saves us a ton of time.

So it took some programming, but it wasn't very much programming. A few hours if you paid someone.

Hope this helps.

[meelosh]

thanks max....yes it will save time and headache..appreciate it.
cheers