It's a lot of extra hassle and I have seen no benefit whatsoever!

I would sure appreciate your opinions.

Thanks
Doug

I thought that their purpose was to help get pages of a site crawled (not indexed) that mught otherwise be hard to crawl.

I haven't actually used Google Sitemaps, but given they're still quite new and continuing to be developed I'm not thinking they're dead at all.

Just curious, but what benefits were you expecting to see. Just like gringo said the main idea behind Sitemaps is to get pages of a site crawled that might otherwise be hard to find. Are your pages getting crawled?

A really nice thread to look into http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=388258

similar thread at HR http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...howtopic=23290

If one does not use a Google Sitemap, is there an alternative Site Map program that works. Presently, I use a good old fashion html sitemap. But, I only have maybe 50 articles. I need to create several thousand pages. How would you get several thousand on a Site Map without using a Google Map?

If your internal linking structure is good there should be no need for a sitemap.

If you store your information in a database you could get the urls from the database and create your sitemap from that, That way youd never need to edit it again.

Okay... interesting answer. Do you put all URLs that you want to spider in a database, or do you put the URLs and the information itself into the database? ie) URL in one field, and text into another field of the same record? Does it make a difference if the articles are in their own folder, or should they be outside, directly under public_html/

I know at least one good sitemap generator tool
See also: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html