Do sitemaps.xml really help you to get listed in google, cos that might be an option for me? Some posts I read say absolutely this is a free back door into Google and others are not so hot on it Hopefully someone has a fundamental answer to this - even if it is yes or no.

by having a submitted Google site map, google will index your pages faster, and will notice and the addition or subtraction of web pages. i say google sitemap is good, and wont hurt you.

well we took a test , made 2 sites at the exact same time, pretty similar, took 3 days for both to get indexed, 1 i submitted a sitemap to google and the other one was a standard google site submission, so urmm, dunno if its making a difference at all

Originally Posted by roy77

by having a submitted Google site map, google will index your pages faster,

No they won't

A google sitemap is only of use if your site create a potential problem for crawling beyond that there is no tangible benefit at all

Originally Posted by chrishirst

No they won't

A google sitemap is only of use if your site create a potential problem for crawling beyond that there is no tangible benefit at all

Agreed, sitemap is an option if your inner pages are not crawled by robots, there are some situations that you must use sitemap submission.

you will give information about web site pages to the googlebot . this makes the sitemap important

I personally believe that google site map will increase site rank. Lot of my site's rank h improved after sitemap submission.

Originally Posted by trichnosis

you will give information about web site pages to the googlebot . this makes the sitemap important

Not if the googlebot already has that information gathered from a 'normal' crawl. In that case the sitemap is redundant.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

No they won't

A google sitemap is only of use if your site create a potential problem for crawling beyond that there is no tangible benefit at all

I just happened to submit an .xml site map today for this very reason. Half of the pages on one of my sites are dynamically driven and have never been indexed by Google. We shall see how long it takes.

I used the free Google Sitemap Generator (Tarrant IT.com), written by Greg Tarrant, and manually added pages that it didn't catch.

Has anyone tried the Dreamweaver plug-in written by George Petrov of Dynamic Zones (http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=10538)?

I personally believe that google site map will increase site rank. Lot of my site's rank h improved after sitemap submission.

Didn't work for me, huh.

If your site is "fairly" new and you have many pages submitting a sitemap to Google will get your deep url's crawled faster. If you have a standard sitemap it takes forever for Google to deep crawl.

Within one week of submitting my first sitemap to Google I was taken out of Supplemental Results and all my deep pages are indexed.

It could of been a coincidence but I doubt it.

I first submitted my sitemap on February 26th, and look at the results.

Originally Posted by damdanger

well we took a test , made 2 sites at the exact same time, pretty similar, took 3 days for both to get indexed, 1 i submitted a sitemap to google and the other one was a standard google site submission, so urmm, dunno if its making a difference at all

Great example.

Its funny that this thread is full of, "I think...", "I believe...", "I'm sure it helped...", etc. But, only one person made an objective test. And nobody listened.

C'mon guys, forget the anecdotal evidence and look at the objective evidence. This is just like discussions on directory submissions, link exchanges, and all the other ideas.

Yeah
But speculation and guesswork is much easier than actually testing something.

Originally Posted by willcode4beer

Great example.

Its funny that this thread is full of, "I think...", "I believe...", "I'm sure it helped...", etc. But, only one person made an objective test. And nobody listened.

C'mon guys, forget the anecdotal evidence and look at the objective evidence. This is just like discussions on directory submissions, link exchanges, and all the other ideas.

That was a great "objective test", but being crawled and indexed are two different animals.

Some other factors, being that both websites were new are:

Were there any backlinks to either site?
What rank did the backlinks have?