Site Map Importance For PR

[kjbowen18]

Whats the opinion on Sitemaps?? How important are they for getting indexed and ranking?? I have tried uploading my sitemap to google several times, and they keep saying there is errors, however they do not say what the errors are and everything looks good to me. any suggestions??

[OfferUK]

I think a sitemap can be useful, from a visitor perspective too.

There are a number of Google sitemap generators online - have you tried using one of them to generate a sitemap and avoid errors?

[error 404]

Originally Posted by kjbowen18

Whats the opinion on Sitemaps?? How important are they for getting indexed and ranking?

A sitemap is not necessary to rank well. It is obvious that a sitemap does not make a site better for the visitors. So, you can be number one on popular keywords without sitemaps.

That said, a sitemap makes it easier for Google to deal with your website, specially if its contents change often or if you want new pages to be indexed more quickly.

Jean-Luc

[vectro]

As long as there are links to your pages, Google can find them without a sitemap. I use sitemaps to my advantage is by using plug-ins for content management systems that automatically add new pages to the map. Since the map is submitted to Google, it just helps things get indexed faster. Even without the auto-add function it still tells Google which pages are part of one site. When I'm not using a plug-in, I like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to generate maps.

[alter-ego]

I have no proof of this whatsoever so please don't roast me for it.

Personally, I've found that google and the other SE's seem to index my entire articles much quicker with the use of a sitemap than without. Before using a sitemap, google would only index my article intro in both Joomla and Wordpress and rank me low until such time as they finally found/ranked the entire article.

As for getting and/or increasing page rank via a sitemap, I've yet to see it make any definitive difference.

[woogley]

if you have many pages, then you need to make a decision.

[boblord666]

At least with a sitemap you know exactly how many pages Google has indexed and when. Without a sitemap you are only guessing.

I have no idea if it has any effect on PR.

I use XML Notepad if Google reports an error, it reports where the error is.

[chimeara]

sitemap is still useful i guess.

[kjbowen18]

Thanks, I got the sitemap issue taken care of. Ended up being a simple error Using a capital in the "sitemap" title and not using a capital when uploading. In any case Once I got the site map uploaded about 3 or 4 in the afternoon, my page was indexed by the next morning. guess it could have been luck

[mr.joebert]

I like writing scripts to generate sitemaps directly from the database. It allows me to make sure everything gets included and also spot things that may not be getting linked from anywhere on the site itself.

I think sitemaps for human consumption are pretty much useless though. The only people I've seen use them instead of any of the numerous easier ways to navigate a site, including a search engine, are only doing so because they have some sort of biased interest in the sitemap to begin with.

[catchingsmoke]

It's not like it's going to take days to make a site map so considering it can be done in a few minuets you may as well just do it. Because any benifit for such a small amount of work is reasonable

[Facebokguru]

Sitemap make your website SE friendly.

the result obviously good for your website.

[edosauyi]

A sitemap will not make a site rank higher it only makes google aware of your site pages.

[ELCaD]

A sitemap alone won't make you rank higher, but it will help the search engines in crawling your site.
If you are using a CMS like Joomla or Wordpress then grab an add-on that will generate an automatic sitemap when you post something and will then ping the search engine. This way the SE will crawl your site and index a lot quicker than without it.

[joelchrist]

I dont know whether site map will be helpful on page rank or not but definitely , it will be helpful to quick indexing of your site.

[lxh]

That's odd, usually they would let you know what error you are having. Then to be able to fix such issues, you could go to their help forum. =)

[Ahtivas]

Sitemaps provide a way for Web sites to be indexed properly and what new content has been added..

[gothic love]

if you build your site in the right way you dont need a site map. if all your pages are easy to access and to find and people dont get lost in your site than you are doing a great jpb and you dont need sitemap