What is a site map ? I have already got indexed my site in the google. How does site map will help then?

A site map is a listing of all the pages on your site and their associated hyperlinks. It helps search engines figure out which pages should be indexed and provides a quick and easy way to get to them.

Will it include sub domains? When i generated a site map using some tool, it only displayed site and its inner pages...but not sub domains.
Do I need to submit a sitemap even for subdomain?

So basically, You dont need sitemap to get indexed?

Steve

You need links to get indexed, from pages that are already indexed. If you're selling "SEO Packages" you shouldn't be asking this kind of question.

I always have problems with subdomains. Based on my experience, subdomains are usually take longer time to get indexed, and as far as their PR concern it's very hard to raise their PR. I even tried to get backlins to them, but it doesn't help.

So, I am also very confused of how to deal with subdomains and how to promote them. Do they need to be in sitemap, etc.? If someone share experience that would be very appreciated. Please help.

Have a great day,
Peter

sub domains are very very simple, you probably deal with one every single day you do any work on your site.


The hostname is the registered sitename.
then there is ccTLD (Country Code Top-Level Domain) [.co.uk, .co.jp] and gTLD (Generic Top-Level Domain) [.com, .net, .org]

so the main site is sitename. gTLD|ccTLD

this is the important bit;

any prefix to the hostname is a sub domain. So as you can probably see, the www whatever IS a sub domain

A site map is a blueprint for a Web site. It helps SE's which pages should be indexed.

Hey Adam and Sem1,

I am struggling with this "why do I need it" concept also. It seems redundant if I have a well organized navigation system on a static site where every page is exposed to the bots by the second level of link following. That sounds confusing to me and I wrote it. An example: Main index page >sub-pages>additional pages.

The sitemap is only going to be an expanded "tree" version of my nav links.

I really would appreciate your and any other comments.

Originally Posted by markov

What is a site map ? I have already got indexed my site in the google. How does site map will help then?

Well, sitemap is a map of your site. It is a collection of hyperlinks that outlines a website's structure.

It palys an important role in indexing your all web pages easily and early in search engines. Always add a sitemap to your site and link it to all of your webpage and also submit your sitemap to search engines and you will find most of your webpages indexed earlier.

Sitemap gives the Googlebot a head-up on what pages have changed on a site and need re-fetching.

Once you submit a site-map, google will fetch it almost daily or even more frequently. This way the bot knows which pages have changed the same day.

Without the site-map, it could even take a month or even more for google to fetch the page and then come to know that it is changed.

Once you submit a site-map, google will fetch it almost daily or even more frequently. This way the bot knows which pages have changed the same day.

Without the site-map, it could even take a month or even more for google to fetch the page and then come to know that it is changed.

And do you know this for a fact? or is it simply reiterated Nth hand information?

Originally Posted by coolslko

It palys an important role in indexing your all web pages easily and early in search engines. Always add a sitemap to your site and link it to all of your webpage and also submit your sitemap to search engines and you will find most of your webpages indexed earlier.

You really don't want to link to something on every page of your site that doesn't help your users.

From google webmaster guidlines:

Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

and

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

I see it mostly as a way to tell google about new links. I always include a sitemap on the sites I build.

Mia

So it helps the google bot get updates. But I don't think it helps your ranking, does it? How much time does it take to make a site map? Do you charge your freelance clients extra for site maps?

Try this http://www.sitemapspal.com/

site map is important especially to those site that often updates and has a large number of internal links. submitting site maps to search engines helps a lot to the crawlers. crawlers can easily find the updates that have been done in your site.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

You really don't want to link to something on every page of your site that doesn't help your users.

Ya, but it will be search engine friendly......

And do you know this for a fact? or is it simply reiterated Nth hand information?

A lot of what I have learnt is from others, but this is first hand.

On one of my web-sites, I log each visit from all sources into the mysql database. Later I can run ad-hoc queries on it to do a daily SERP analysis, Pagewise SERP analysis, trend analysis to compare result of 1 day with last week, week before that, Googlebot visit analysis etc.

An analysis of 29 pages from 01-29 March shows that Googlebot visited 49 times or roughly 1.7 visits per day, which is more than the homepage. Other fast changing pages as the Googlebot learned from the sitemap, were also visited more than once per day.

And have you then taken the sitemap down and see if it changes?