XML sitemap for dynamic comparison site

[VividMind]

I have a website that allows to compare about 100-150 products in a niche and the number of permutations is rather high (tens of thousands of pages, maybe hundreds), since comparison pages are dynamic and can include up to 5 products. Now Google doesn't know about most of these comparison pages, since there is no page or sitemap listing them all.

I was thinking about having a dynamic XML sitemap that would make all these dynamic pages accessible to Google.

These are the questions I have:

1. Is this a good practice - using XML sitemaps to expose the comparison pages?
2. Are XML sitemaps dynamic in their nature? I know you can submit one through GWT. Do you have to resubmit the sitemap every time your content changes or google will somehow re-crawl those?

[Trevor]

Originally Posted by VividMind

I have a website that allows to compare about 100-150 products in a niche and the number of permutations is rather high (tens of thousands of pages, maybe hundreds), since comparison pages are dynamic and can include up to 5 products. Now Google doesn't know about most of these comparison pages, since there is no page or sitemap listing them all.

I was thinking about having a dynamic XML sitemap that would make all these dynamic pages accessible to Google.

These are the questions I have:

1. Is this a good practice - using XML sitemaps to expose the comparison pages?
2. Are XML sitemaps dynamic in their nature? I know you can submit one through GWT. Do you have to resubmit the sitemap every time your content changes or google will somehow re-crawl those?

1. From what I can understand these tens of thousands of comparison pages are without content, so I don't think your site will benefit from Google knowing about each and every one of them. Remember, increasing the number of indexed pages doesn't necessarily lead to better rankings.
2. It depends on what you mean by dynamic. If you add a page to your site, your XML should instantly add a link to the newly-created page. If that is "dynamic", then yes, they are dynamic in nature and no, you don't have to re-submit.

[VividMind]

Originally Posted by Trevor

1. From what I can understand these tens of thousands of comparison pages are without content, so I don't think your site will benefit from Google knowing about each and every one of them. Remember, increasing the number of indexed pages doesn't necessarily lead to better rankings.

Here's an example of a comparison page on my site. It compares various product features, so it actually has content. The value for the user is if he wants to compare two or more certain products and he is searching by phrase "A vs. B comparison" he will get all of these on one page, and I'd like to be in the results for that.

Originally Posted by Trevor

2. It depends on what you mean by dynamic. If you add a page to your site, your XML should instantly add a link to the newly-created page. If that is "dynamic", then yes, they are dynamic in nature and no, you don't have to re-submit.

Thanks!

[VividMind]

So, does submitting a sitemap with a ton of comparison pages like in the example above help? I'm eager to try it if I'm sure that it will at least not harm the site.

[Trevor]

Well, you can try to make Google index all these comparison pages and see whether you'll get listed in the SERPs for keywords like "product x vs product y". I think you could, as the competition for these kinds of keywords is really weak!

[VividMind]

Thanks Trevor! I'm going to create this dynamic sitemap and see how Google reacts. Will post my results here as I'm sure this might interest some people and I didn't find much info on dynamic sitemaps for comparison sites so far.