Google and Yahoo Sitemaps

[SEOJaimie]

Hi,

If you have a properly architected site in terms of link structure, is there any compelling reason to use a sitemap from Google or Yahoo?

Theoretically, it you update the timestamp it will know to come back and look, but has anyone seen concrete results?

Yahoo allows submissions in RSS, Atom, and TXT.
Google allows submissions in some proprietary Google format, RSS2, Atom, and TXT.

TXT is kind of pointless, because it will not contain dates, though ...

J.

[Marty]

I use RSS for Sitemaps on my blog. I dont see any different, because Google index my new post after 1-2 days past.

[Thomas Schulz]

At least if you have a large site, I think sitemaps help Google update and find new pages quicker.

Like, faster to download a single file looking for changes than... crawling the whole website looking for changes :-)

[Bruno]

You don't need anything else then BL for that :)

[sprouty]

My opinion on this subject relates only to my experiences with Google - I've never played with "sitemaps" directed towards any other search engine (and I only did so with Google because, at the time, people were reporting that submitting sitemaps was, in some cases, causing a complete delisting of their site - I wanted some of that :) )

I used to make all my sites - build them all from the ground up. Link to them. wait. Then came "sitemaps" from Google.

Google sitemaps seemed like a great way to get Google to at least look at your site and its structure and, despite tales of woe, I saw only improvements in listed pages and rankings.

Then I "discovered" WordPress (I wasn't the first person- that's not what I want to say. I'm not a Columbus type of person - "I discovered it" is, perhaps, a little rich; a little strong).

WordPress doesn't need all these things - although there is a very good plugin which "pings" Google each time you change anything on your blog - if I were Google, I'd be annoyed with that.

And now I've gone back to building my sites from the basement up.

My first of the new wave is a gem - it's a rewrite and has a host of changes - one of these is the "sitemap" - I created my "sitemap" this week and am now seeing results. I see this as positive rather than negative.

I think it's a good idea to use it - because the mechanism is in place to use the information sent by your pings - check your raw stats, those sitemap.xml (or .gz, ...) are read - they're popular guys!

I've no reason to prefer NOT using a Google "sitemap". Yet.