There are many benefits to having a sitemap. Is having one absolutely necessary? Well, no, but it should be used for many of the reasons you mentioned.

Thanks for your comment and adding to the discussion.

Good article John. In my opinion, the very obvious answer to the topic is YES an XML sitemap is very much Necessary. Here are some advantages

1. One of the major advantages is that owners of websites find errors they never knew existed on their sites! These errors can prevent sites from being indexed by Google, Yahoo MSN and others!

2. Another advantage is that you are telling Google when your site is updated. (you should re-submit your site map and upload it into the Google webmasters area when you add new pages to your site by the way). I cannot prove this theory but I feel strongly that the more pages you build and the more you re-submit an updated site map – It’s like feeding the spiders food! They love this. They want to know that you update your site often and have fresh content and new pages.

3. Sitemaps begins collecting information about that site and there are great reports and stats that are in the webmasters area and are very helpful and inciteful.

4. It definitely speeds up the process where Google finds new web pages and lists them in the serps quicker!

5. It helps tremondously to drop dead pages that you don’t want in the serps like when you change a page URL for example

6. As you mentioned John, Google went through the trouble to offer this free service and it was surely only to help their bots crawl pages (among other possible various reasons). So what the man wants… the man should get! (the man being Google of course!)

Lastly, I should note that I was tentative myself initially because hey, lets be realistic, you never really know whats going on in the big picture sometimes, but I feel it has helped Google find my pages quicker and I feel it has helped me in the serps as well and have not had any negative repercussions that I can see from using the tool.

Keep up the good work John!

Charlie

See you around.

Those are good points. The short answer really is, no, you don’t need a sitemap. However, there are benefits they give you. And those sitemap generators are great for finding errors and broken links you might have on your site, like you mentioned.

If someone is on the fence on whether to have one or not, I’d say go for it.

This is not all but is enough to spend a minute making a sitemap.

Yes i agree with John Hoff also, a google sitemap is important and not important. If you site is well laid out and you are a pro you have nothing to worry about but is you make mistakes and like stats then get a sitemap added, Takes about one minute for a small site and will make most happier.

I’m curious, how are you hoping it helps?

If you really think about it, are they really all that important? Your website will be spidered by web crawlers whether you have one or not. Also, a sitemap doesn’t do too much for you SEO-wise unless it catches a page that’s not being crawled for some reason (like a nofollow, problem in the robots.txt file, or broken link).

As an example, our landscape website, Modern Landscape, has no xml sitemap and yet it ranks #1 on Yahoo, Google, Ask, MSN and others when people search for landscape companies in las vegas.

I do believe it’s good to have one still – I mean, Google went to all the trouble of dealing with Sitemaps for a reason. I’m currently writing my next post which is about SEO techniques I use and I do mention not to forget the Sitemap, even if it has limited SEO value.

I think sitemaps are pretty important. I remember reading so much about them, I finally added one. I’m hoping it helps.

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