What do people think of Google sitemaps?

[zen_warrior]

There was a thread involving this a while ago but I want to bring it up again now that this service has been around for a little bit and see if people feel differently now. Has anybody seen increased traffic to their sites, better indexing, or any other benefits of this service? I know it's in BETA and Google specifically states that participating has no effect on PageRank or position in search results but I'm not seeing any changes for my domains at all. I have quite a few domains that have now been signed up for months. I see that Google downloads my sitemaps every few hours or so but my logs are not showing the Googlebot visiting any more frequently, regardless of how often my feed says I update my pages. It also appears that I don't have any more pages in their index than I did before participating despite the fact that they appear on my sitemap.

Anybody else have a similar experience?

-Mike

[zen_warrior]

Nobody is using Google sitemaps or has anything to contribute to this post?

[jddesigns]

similar results

I have worked with the Google Sitemap program and I haven't seen any results. In fact, my page still doesn't show up on Google, although it does show on Yahoo. Any suggestions to help me out?

http://www.j-ddesigns.com

[zen_warrior]

Jeff-
How long has it been since you started using the sitemap utility? How long has your site been around? How often do you update the content?

My first thoughts as to why you're not showing up if your site has been around a long time and you update it often is the flash splash page. I've always read that search engines aren't fond of flash. Although I believe I've read that new technolgoy exists or is being developed that would allow flash content to be indexed. At any rate, it's possible that when Google hits your home page and sees zero content, it just moves on to another site.

You might want to post in the flash forum and ask about indexing.

Hope that helps.
Mike

[mdvaldosta]

If your site's worth indexing, then google will do it. I don't think a sitemap is going to have anything to do with increasing your page rankings and getting search engines to spider you. Now, if you've got a good page ranking and your still not getting spidered (for example you have alot of dynamic content like php pages) then a sitemap may be of use. Thats just my opinion though, I'm not an expert.

[Detective]

Jeff,

I had the same issue with my site and I think it was/is just a mater of time.

[zen_warrior]

Bravo-

I agree. My stats now show visits by the googlebot on an almost daily basis for pages indicating frequent updates.

Mike

[slake09]

The sitemaps service works for me. The site I use it on was only getting a couple of pages crawled (my fault: frames, tables and other mistakes) so when I redesigned I did the sitemap thing and now it has all the pages indexed. PageRank went up, number of visitors went up, the number of links from other sites went up.

[SixtyMarketing]

sitemaps help google when they crawl your website, it doesnt mean they index these pages straight away. in your webmasters tools you can request google to crawl your website up to 10 times per month. try this and you will find your pages get indexed a lot quicker.

[Vapr_Arts]

sitemaps help google when they crawl your website, it doesnt mean they index these pages straight away. in your webmasters tools you can request google to crawl your website up to 10 times per month. try this and you will find your pages get indexed a lot quicker.

Really? This has to be a record.. Ive seen ppl resurrect 2, 3, and 4 year old posts, but a 10 year old post has to be the oldest.


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