How Important is a Sitemap Page

It has been my experience that it doesn't help all that much. More important is having good inlinks to your site, including links to internal pages on your site. That will get you indexed more than anything else.

Adding the sitemap might help the non-indexed pages get updated. I have a sitemap but I don't have all the pages on my site, just the ones I want there.

Ok, contrary to the previous two comments, a sitemap is SUPREMELY important in getting your large site indexed thoroughly.

I run several web directories as a side business... One has over 6,000 pages, another will be approaching 3,000 pages pretty soon.

If I didn't have EFFECTIVE, custom built sitemap programs, my site would suck in the rankings. But I do, and therefore my site rocks the search results.

The key to getting a large site indexed is setting the priority in your sitemap. For instance, since the most important pages in my directories are the DEEP pages, then I set the priority to the deep URLs at .9. The home page is the only 1.0, and all the crawling pages (drill-down, or whatever you want to call them) are only .5

This is why I had to write a custom sitemap script because most sitemap generators automatically assign priority, top-down. If I let that happen, my deep pages would be the .5 and that would communicate to Google that they aren't important.

So, yes... if you have a large site, you MUST utilize sitemaps. Don't listen to any other advice... SEO for large sites is a very different animal, and there aren't many people who know how to manage SEO on large sites, so you won't get a lot of experienced advice on this topic.... trust me.

The most important things you should focus on with a large site is "crawl" and internal linking strategy.

Oh, last thing... I've had sitemaps with more than 3,000 records and all my pages got indexed. I like to break up my sitemaps by category (I run web directories, so creating separate sitemaps by category is a natural organization method). So look for ways to break your sitemap into smaller chunks.

It can help the google spider index your site faster, and google does like fast websites.

It's not needed ,but it can help.

There are lots of tools out there that will spider & provide a XML sitemap for you, just search for it on google.

Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) in length when uncompressed and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. This means that if your site contains more than 50,000 URLs or your Sitemap is bigger than 10MB, you must create multiple Sitemap files and use a Sitemap index file. You should use a Sitemap index file even if you have a small site but plan on growing beyond 50,000 URLs or a file size of 10MB.

Your best bet is just to use a script that will create your sitemap and your xml sitemap for you.

Hi Brian,

There is an important distinction between a site map (two words) and a sitemap (one word). They are two entirely different things.

When Google refers to a site map (two words) they are talking about a page that lists links to all the important pages on your website so that visitors may quickly find what they are looking for. This page is for the benefit of visitors to your website.

When Google refers to sitemaps (single word) they are referring to a special file created in XML format, based on the sitemap for search engines schema. This special file tells the search engines what pages you want indexed, how often and the relative importance of each page.

ehicks is correct. An XML Sitemap is an essential tool.

I have found that having a Google XML site map (pointed to by the robots.txt file) helps getting all your pages indexed.

You should have every page on there and 300 pages isn't too much.

I use the following FREE web site to create XML site maps from my sites:

auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp

better make multiple sitemap and submit all...try to reduce the no of URL in each sitemap

Google suggests the number of links per sitemap. You can have multiple sitemaps and submit all to Google.

Wordpress: dagon sitemap generator works like a charm

you can visit this site:

Free XML Google Sitemap Generator php Auto Updates - Easy to Use!

Sitemaps are helpful if a site is new and has few links to it or a site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

Sitemap is very important and could help your pages indexed fast..

I have found that since I started providing Google type XML sitemaps for all my sites, they get crawled by the major SEs within hours and indexed within a week. So, YES I think they are important.

Jenie, thanks for that reference to the XML generator. I will check it out.

why in the world are you designing a site with 3000 + pages ??
Do you know that you can design sites using databases and its a less headache ??
Take a look at what PHP & mySQL can do for you.

I agree with this. Get your sitemap asap. I have one on all my sites.