Yes sitemaps are 100% useful as per SEO tech. You can directly submit google or any major search engine your site map and pages will get indexed faster.

What kind of sitemaps? Are you talking about the HTML file or the XML file that is read by Google itself?

Either way, it helps -- it ensures that your content is being spidered or at least that the search engines are aware of it so that your content does eventually get spidered and indexed.

XML and HTML sitemaps are not promotional tools and will not help you get more traffic. HTML sitemaps help human beings find pages on your website (if they have to use a sitemap to find your content then your site probably is difficult to navigate and you need to fix it).

XML sitemaps help search engines find your pages. You only need an XML sitemap if you use non-search engine friendly navigation on your website (i.e. javascript or flash based navigation) or some of your content can't be reached through normal inks on your website. Otherwise XML sitemaps offer you nothing.

But i think sitemaps help your pages to get indexed faster.

They don't help any pages get indexed faster.

> Otherwise XML sitemaps offer you nothing.

I'm not so sure I agree with this, Stymiee. Google's sitemap format allows for you to include various information about each of your pages such as how often it gets updated, the last time the page is modified, and the relative priority of the page with respect to the rest of your site.

Google insists that submitting this information will allow for a "smarter crawl." Because Google's sitemap format is relatively new, I can't see them taking all this time to introduce this format and then just disregard it so soon after.

I've actually had a bad experience with Google Sitemaps in the past. Once upon a time, I had learned that people coming in from the search engines to my forum display pages converted much better than people coming into individual threads. They spent longer on the site, visited more pages, and were more likely to register. Therefore, in an effort to get Google to send more people to my forum display pages, I started giving a high priority in my sitemaps to the forum display pages, and giving a much lower priority to my actual thread pages.

This resulted in an instant reaction of Google sending me much less traffic. I was telling G to weigh my forum display pages higher, but what I seemed to have forgotten is that all that's on them is a listing of thread links with no actual content or substance. Therefore, Google didn't want to send people to these pages. And the pages full of great content - the threads - I was telling Google had a low priority on my site.

A few months later I switched the priorities around in my sitemap and saw an instant turnaround. I don't believe that it was coincidental.

However, I want to say that this all happened right after sitemaps were first introduced. It's very possible that Google had not yet defined exactly how much weight to put on them as part of their algorithm.

I also can't completely agree with stymiee. HTML sitemaps help users, but they also help the Googlebot which crawls your site to get to those deeper pages.

XML sitemaps help the search engines know about your pages. It doesn't mean that they'll crawl your content immediately.

At the end of the day, it doesn't hurt to have both.

I actually think that having an XML sitemap on my blog caused the brand new site to be indexed within 3 weeks. Typically, you're "sandboxed" in for 9 months. The turnaround time for me was quite awesome.

The XML sitemaps are in theory supposed to help with indexing but Google admittedly ignores the additional content they allow in sitemaps. That doesn't mean they don't use it to try to learn about the habits of webmasters but as of this point in time they don't use it to affect the crawl rates or deepness of any websites.

As with any website, the crawl rate and how deep Google will crawl will depend heavily on PR of the pages. If you want Google to crawl deeper and more frequently increase your PR. That will be much more effective then an XML sitemap.

But they aren't a promotional tool. They are a usability tool. To make a HTML sitemap for a search engine instead of for your users is having priorities backwards. Yes, HTML sitemaps are helpful to search engines, but only as a byproduct of helping humans first.

Definitely. They're both easy to do and should be a no-brainer especially for db driven sites as they can update both sitemaps automatically.

Actually that sandbox theory is untrue (and just one of hundreds of different variations floating around out there). Most sites launch and never experience anything resembling the sandbox. And sites that are in the sandbox see no benefit from an xml sitemap. In fact they rarely see any benefit from anything other then waiting a year or two depending on who you ask.

> but as of this point in time they don't use it to affect the crawl rates or deepness of any websites.

But what about the priority parameter of the Google Sitemaps, as was in my example? I gave a higher priority to the pages that Google thought were less crawlworthy and a much lower priority to the pages that Google thought were more crawlworthy. As a result, the more crawlworthy pages decreased heavily in the SERPS and the less crawlworthy pages stayed the same in the SERPS.