so do you think its useful to add a xml sitemap to your site?
I'm hearing to many people saying its better for website to start without it.
does anyone know if its helping or if its making things worse?

I think the xml sitemap is just how you submit to Google Sitemaps program. You really don't need to submit a sitempa to Google though. Generally if you create a simple html sitemap and have a link to it on your home page the search engines will find it and index all the pages on your site.

Having a sitemap is a good thing for your site to allow the search engines to spider the site easily. If you think the Google spiders will have trouble getting through your site then you might want to submit a sitemap to them.

I never did and I have a normal sitemap for my user.

hey Van, do you have a sitemap?
im looking for a tool to make it easy but cant find something good.

It has some useful info, it shows if google gets any errors searching your site, and it tells the last time it spidered it.

It is more for sites that might have trouble for google to navigate (ie: poor design) such as flash navigation, some javascript navigation, etc

It helps Google, that's it.

I think if you have a bunch of cross site linking and you put all your websites into the same sitemap account - it's gonna cost you rankings because G (for sure now) knows all those sites are related. I don't see how it could hurt anything otherwise though, only help.

wow i thought about that.
its sucks.

Oren, I do have a sitemap on my site. There's a link to it in the navigation at the bottom of my site. It's nothing special, just a list of links to the pages on my site. I did break the list up a little into the sections where the page appears on my site and gave a one or two sentence description of the section.

It's really just another page on my site though. No special technology used.