Google Sitemaps
 

Always was suspicious of those things. Note a recent email:

''Hey guys, this is the last email from adultpornosearch.com you'll get.

If we have a hard link trade, let me know i have other sites we can put you on.

If you post to adultpornosearch.com, we have moved the site just reply and i'll give you the info.

Sorry for all this, but google sitemaps just fucked up all our trafic and rankings.

Whatever you do to your site, do not i repeat do not ever, ever, ever use google sitemaps."

Dabro

I just put up a sitemap on one of my domains to give it a try.

It would be interesting to hear why this guy thinks the sitemap fucked up his ranking.

Yeah, I asked myself the same question...

Like Lemmy I'm using Google Sitemaps on one domain, just to see what happens. It's a blog, so I'm using the sitemap plugin to auto-update the sitemap. So far I've not seen much effect at all plus or minus.

Coincidence?
 

Here is my experience with sitemaps:

But there is other webmasters using sitemaps without problems.
I think that it's better to use some home made html or xml sitemap pages or just a good navigation scheme based on links.

I wrote a little sitemap plugin for one of my sites a while back too. Like the rest, it was to see what happens. I haven't had any problems either, but everything in the sitemap was as "relavent" as I could manage.

Another thing, as BishopWeber pointed out, because of my internal linking structure, and some quality backlinks, a fair amount of my pages were already indexed.

Seems to me that if a page is worth Google's attention (ie, it's not spam), googlebot should have already found it, so a google sitemap isn't worth too much.

Furthermore, if said site is full of spam, and said site spams that spam in a site map of spam, maybe the problem isn't the map to all the spam, but all the spam spamming spam? |huh

Problems are more likely to be down to not understanding a few things about the format and stuff.

Firstly the change frequency tag - apart from the index on a blog dont set it to anything other than monthly. why? Because apparently G keeps track of whether you are lying or not....

Secondly the last updated tag - if you use it and leave it the same then the bot WILL NOT check to see if the page has changed more often than once a year. Do this on the index and nothing will be found. Either keep it up to date or dont use it.

I use it on my biggest site and find it doesnt help much but neither does it hinder. I find it better to write html sitemaps of the abc sort on larger sites - ie

top level sitemap - index - link abc - link-def - link ghi
Next level sitemap - abc - all pages whose titles begin with a, b or c

Then I place a blank gif with the alt tag -"sitemap for (site name)" linked to the sitemap on the index of a seperate site I own with some pagerank on a seperate IP. This way the indexing of the sitemap and sub pages is assured.

Now that's an interesting idea. Thanks for the tip Satan. |thumb

After first looking into G sitemaps when it was new, the research and commentary at the time was that you were giving G way to much access and insight into your site metrics and that they could (might) be used against you later somehow.|huh

I just thought it wasn't worth the risk and confusion and made my own sitemaps and I agree with the comment that if its worth indexing and g is already at your site then it will find a new page too!