Creating a Google Sitemap - Worth The Investment?

November 30th, 2005 • Related • Filed Under

I’ve read a lot of posts about the launch of Google Sitemaps, but I haven’t seen anything in the aftermath confirming if they have had a positive impact on a site’s traffic or not.

For those of you who don’t know what a Google Sitemap is, it is an XML map of a site which can be submitted to Google containing information such as change frequency, priority, date created and more.

It is an experimental service which should help Google’s spiders know what URLs are available on your site and about how often they change. The theory is that this could improve your site listings.

So:

  • Has anyone seen an uplift in traffic? If so, how much?
  • How often do you resubmit your Google Sitemap?
  • How do you create your Sitemap - what tools do you use?
  • Have you seen any other benefits?

Update: This is the best online tool I’ve found to create a Google Sitemap. It allows up to 2000 links whereas other tools seem to allow only 500.

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About the Author

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Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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There Are 2 Responses So Far. »

  1. #1

    Comment by Benjamin Niemann on 30 November 2005:

    The primary purpose of Sitemap is not to optimize your search ranking or driving more traffic to your page. It's about optimizing the work of googlebot.
    So with a proper Sitemap, googlebot will crawl your pages more efficiently, saving cputime and bandwidth (your and google's) that can be used for more important things, *without* reducing the quality of the search results.
    It could result in better results for your pages in some cases, e.g. when googlebot is unable to find important pages or if it does not scan important pages often enough, because *all* your pages seem (for googlebot) to be updated often because of dynamic but irrelevant content.
    So the question you should ask is, if people noticed changes in googlebots visits in their access_log.
    (Well that's how I understand it at least - I haven't used it myself sofar…)

  2. #2

    Comment by Everton Blair on 30 November 2005:

    Thanks for that Benjamin. I'll keep an eye on my logs to see if I notice any difference. I wonder if anyone has seen a lower load/any improvements

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