Google sitemaps. Is it worth it?

Today I read this blog post from Daniel Lindberg, which sais that sitemaps may - after all - not be so good for the SEO of a web site. There are many webmasters out there who claim that their sites are getting less search engine traffic from the time when they decided to submit their sitemaps to google.

The problem seems to be the fact that when you submit a sitemap your site may be deindexed and lose all the SEPRs untill it is reindexed but with fewer pages in the SERPs.

My experience in this subject is very small, as the only site that I have added a sitemap - and submitted it to google - is this, and I am worried a little as this site has a lot of search engine traffic.

Please share your experiences with us. What do you think of this? Can a sitemap harm a site after all?

we submit all our sites and client sites via sitemaps, I checked a sample (20 sites) and the average crawl was just over 7 days without sitemaps and just over 7 days with site maps however individual pages that we had marked as a priority often were crawled between 5 to 7 days.

Crawl lags due to sitemaps maybe because they have either set the priority to low or made the entire site a top priority, which while google says will not result in a faster crawl would seem to be the sort of thing that would upset the google engineers and may result in a slower crawl.

With Yahoo and MSN now supporting sitemaps its going to be more important to have one I suspect, I wonder how long it will be before its the only way to tell the bots what to crawl.

one other thing, verifying your site adds etc stats I'm not sure if it changes crawl times but it might?

Crawl time shouldn't be affected by the existence or the lack of existence of a sitemap. From my experience this seems to happen - I mean you get faster crawling - when a page has high pagerank, lots of inbound links (even from inside the site) and when this page is updated regularly.

Now regarding the sitemaps thing I guess it depends on what implementation of sitemaps someone has done, but in any case it is a little tricky thing. I mean as your site is going to crawled even if you don't have a sitemap what is the point to this? I know it is just a hint but what happens if those complaints are finally real?

A sitemap is just a way for you to inform a search engine about the site, the idea is if you change a pange only once a year then google doesn't need to keep visiting it every time the sites crawled. It is only information and googlebot only uses it in a very loose way. It is however useful for identifying duplicate content, or at least showing which you wish to show. For example

www.example.com?q=46374687/article1| www.example.com/article1 both same article but the later is in your sitemap google crawls both but shows only the later.

We experimented with this to see if it was true and mixed clean urls and non clean urls into a test sitemap, and google results showed what was in the sitemaps as opposed to the alternate. If you plan on replicating this be aware it took close to a year to get rid of the non clean URL out of the results.

I'm using sitemaps for my directory, great results in the serps (and that for a directory)

I think group of users which are crying that sitemaps are bad are the people which got a clean up, will say Google removed all trash (or outdated sites).

agreed, play by the rules and sitemaps are great abuse them and google will take no notice of your map

short and to the point!

don't thread google and create websites for human people and everyone is happy! :)