Heya, ive read around about google and came across on many places that suggested using GSiteCrawler - reading up on it - its a spider that creates sitemap for Google. Now I got couple of questions.

1. How long do I have to run it, does it stop on its own or can I stop it after some time?

2. It offers to write sitemap file into my server - is it good thing? Can that be potentially harmfull (overwrites some files that shouldnt be or something?)

3. It also offers submit sitemap to Google - now I have not yet submited my site link to Google - as im stil working on it . Now If i would do that would that a. make google aware of my site ( or do I still need to do it manually ) b. does it submit it automatically the sitemap to google? or do I have to do something myself as well

Id apprishiate any advise on this matter.

A google sitemap is only of use IF you have a site that is difficult to crawl or puts obstacles in the way of the SE crawler.
It won't get you any rankings at all.

The only thing you need to make the Search Engines aware of your site is to get some links to it.

Right - then how can I determine whether my site is easy to crawl or not for Google and other SE?

1. It will run till it finishes indexing yor site's urls
2. It only uploads 3 files, the sitemap, the compressed sitemap and a css file for online viewing of the sitemap
3. I think you need to manually submit the sitemap first.

Originally Posted by JTGizmo

Right - then how can I determine whether my site is easy to crawl or not for Google and other SE?

Does it have any broken html? Or have you done anything silly like banning all spiders using robots.txt or .htaccess? ( 99.9 % of web sites haven't and you'd know if you have. ) If you don't have a lot of broken tags ( <strong some text here ) you should be fine.

Do you have a lot of images in place of text? People do that with fonts or special effects you can't do with html and css. Spiders can crawl these pages no problem, but they won't be able to ( or even try ) read the text in these images. If you set your site up that way it won't cause problems for GoogleBot, but it might dampen your ratings a little bit.

I ran Xenu software on my page, it returned with no broken links. And no I don't have allmost any images that are ment to be words.

Sounds ok then;
How about querystrings or session ID in the URL
Too many querystring parameters can slow down crawling. 2 is ok, 3 is pushing it a bit and 4 or more you will have problems.
Session IDs will eventually cause problems with infinite duplication.
Are all your pages going to be less than 3 clicks away from the home page? If so you need an on-site sitemap in preference to a Google sitemap.

There is this current obsession with Google sitemaps and having to have one. It is not an essential and for the vast majority of sites it will be of no use whatsoever.

if u check my signature u will see my site. Question I have Is - do I just let GSiteCrawler run for certain time to get the sitemap or should I let it finish on its own?

I think I have the problem with '?' and 'id=' - if u check the site u could verify. If that is the problem - then what could I do to fix it? How could I fix it?

Quite honestly, with all those querystring parameters you will have more problems than a Google sitemap will fix.

The script needs recoding or rewrite the URLs and this is the ONLY time and the ONLY reason I would recommend URL rewriting

if u check my signature u will see my site. Question I have Is - do I just let GSiteCrawler run for certain time to get the sitemap or should I let it finish on its own?

I think I have the problem with '?' and 'id=' - if u check the site u could verify. If that is the problem - then what could I do to fix it? How could I fix it?

Let it run. Once it is done, it will inform u.
Or the crawler will just say "idle".