Do you use sitemaps?

[MichaelCorfman]

In November 2006 Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced support for Sitemaps version 0.90. Sitemaps provides a free and easy way for webmasters to notify search engines about their websites and be indexed more comprehensively and efficiently. Information about the sitemaps standard can be found at www.sitemaps.org.

Sitemaps are frequently mentioned in our forum, so I thought it would be interesting to ask how many webmasters actually use them for their websites for this week's poll.

Please let us know how you generate your sitemaps, and your thoughts about them.

Michael

[LiveCasinoPartners]

I use sitemaps on all my sites. It's easy to do using www.sitemapdoc.com . This site is free and crawls your site and generates a sitemap automatically. Since it's so easy to do, I figured that the potential advantage is worth my time.

[MrKay]

Its a very similar situation for me, I use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to do the initial sitemap and then manually add pages to the sitemap as I make them.

[Chips]

I just learned about and have used sitemaps for my site that I can generate it for, I have one freebee from site microsoft that I have no ftp access to so I cannot place it. I am using sitemapbuilder.net for now but am going to try some others as it is giving me fits with missed pages.

Side note: There are some great threads here in the private section of different generators to use. Another huge thanks to my fellow members!

[Gamblingdungeon]

I used Sitemaps on all my blogs (Wordpress Blogs). There is an addon, that generates the sitemap and pings the search engines with your sitemap ! It helps get the blog into the search engines quickly.

[Doolally]

I use sitemaps on all of my sites. Generally I add to the XML Sitemap file by hand as I add pages.

[Nandakishore]

We use typo3 CMS which has a plug-in for creating sitemaps.

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[Ziggy]

Myabe I'm obessesive, but I actually use 3:

1) An XML sitemaps for the big 3 search engines that have agreed on their format use
2) A .txt sitemap just in case a robot is clueless about the above
3) A visitors sitemap, which is part of my navigation, in case visitors want to just jump through a single page to see what the entire site contains. (Some do use it).

So, after much consideration, I voted yes I do.

[matted]

No reason not to use a sitemap!

[Nandakishore]

Myabe I'm obessesive, but I actually use 3:

We also use two: one for the visitors and one for the search engines.

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Link exchange welcome. PM me.

[AussieDave]

1) An XML sitemaps for the big 3 search engines that have agreed on their format use
2) A .txt sitemap just in case a robot is clueless about the above
3) A visitors sitemap, which is part of my navigation, in case visitors want to just jump through a single page to see what the entire site contains. (Some do use it).

I use all of the above, except the sitemap.txt. I figure that the bots that follow my robot.txt crawl both xml and html sitemaps.

The SE's that don't follow my robot.txt also ignore my xml sitemap and have never grabbed a sitemap.txt before, so I don't bother adding it.



Cheers



Dave

[ioc]

I use sitemap.xml html, and text url for google and yahoo. sitemap builder creats sitemap easily. All my gambling sites have sitemap.

[cat]

I just found

http://www.sitemapwriter.com/notify.php

when searching for how to submit a msn site map.

It submits your site map to all major search engines in one step.

It seems like no webmaster account like in yahoo or google is needed for submitting a sitemap to msn, is it?

[penny-slot-machines]

It seemed to make a huge difference to my traffic when I put an xml sitemap in. I guess that's just because google indexed the pages better

Did anyone else notice an impact on traffic when they put the xml sitemap up and submitted it to google webmaster tools?

[masontech]

I use sitemaps for everything. I always ensure to submit them via Google WebMaster Tools.

The tool I use to do my gambling site is RapidWeaver. I use the sitemap plugin from LogHound for this.

For my other sites, I use the Google Sitemap Automator from Rage Software.

Both great apps, but Mac only.