Sitemaps really important?

[donwilson]

So I decided to research sitemaps (xml file generated to help google know which pages to spider) and came up with an interesting question.

For my smaller site, I've already created a sitemap file fairly quickly and already applied it to my Google Webmaster section. But for my much more diverse site, it'd easily take me a couple days to make a sitemap for it.

Question: Do you think it's really necessary to make a sitemap? Right now Google has about 5-6k pages in their results for my site, where as I know in at least one section of mine (with quite a bit of differences on each pages) is well over 10,000, let alone 20,000 graphics, thousands of icons, 10,000 contact tables, etc.

Would a sitemap help fix this problem of under recording my site?

[minnseoelite]

I always create a sitemap for my sites in both xml and html format and submit them to G. I don't just do it for the indexing but also to gain the little extra information G provides you with in your G-Sitemaps admin area. It also helps ensure that G and the other search engines can find all pages of your site in case a link becomes broken that your not aware of right away

[layoutstuff]

You should definitely look into XML and static HTML sitemaps for your site. It will help google help you. A little tip, make sure your static html sitemap validates and do it as a seperate "site"... Kinda like a directory for your own sites pages, only. If you can, have no external links on your sitemap pages. This will help spread weight out to many if not all your internal pages

[AbdulR]

Sitemaps just make it more convenient for the crawler to find all your pages.

[minnseoelite]

Sitemaps just make it more convenient for the crawler to find all your pages.

take it you never use the data provided by google sitemaps to help you in your SEO.....shame on you :P

[aydoubleyou]

But for my much more diverse site, it'd easily take me a couple days to make a sitemap for it.

There are sitemap generators that will crawl through your site for you and generate a sitemap I believe. I think most of them limit you at about 500 or so pages, but Im sure there are more powerful ones around.

[pacman0r]

For any of you that run wordpress blogs, there is a great plugin I use on all my blogs that automatically generates and submits a sitemap for you.

You can get it here (http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final)

[minnseoelite]

get a sitemap that runs directly from your server, they usually can go up to 1000's of pages and can completely index sites with flash and javascript navigation

[donwilson]

There are sitemap generators that will crawl through your site for you and generate a sitemap I believe. I think most of them limit you at about 500 or so pages, but Im sure there are more powerful ones around.
Indeed, I've seen that, but it'd take much longer to run that (and probably far less accurate) than to do a custom one. Thanks for the info!

[1mak]

i dont care about sitemaps at all, should try that //:

[nurie]

Sitemaps just make it more convenient for the crawler to find all your pages.

im use google map plugin for my site. im using wordpress . and the plugin worked ...

[nasser]

it don't hurt to have a sitemaps and it help google help you, so yes put one in

[ricester007]

nice info about sitemaps im a try it