Are sitemaps good for a small site

[honestman]

When I read about sites with site maps, they were talking about were hundreds of pages long. My site is only 75 pages and is likely to stay around that number. Is that enough for a site map to be of any advantage? I have a long navigational bar that covers much of the site including articles each bar, products and so on so visitors should be able to get around the sit. Besides that there are links in the content to other pages in the site and occasionally to other sites. As far as I can tell this most likely means the only benefit for having a sitemap for my site is to score points with Goggle and their robots. If my site is not big enough to warrant a
sitemap, is there anything else I can do which would get the same results giving my site favor with Goggle that is the same or similar to having a sitemap would give me?

I am asking this because I have read that when it comes to Adwords, that they might raise your bids to try to get you to quit if they think your site is not big enough or that it doesn’t have enough content. I have read that one of the ways of dealing with this is to have a site map.

I am adding content and changing content all of the time, but do not foresee having a 500 page site. I don't need it and I don’t want to have it just to satisfy Goggle. The sitemap addition has been recommended as a way to deal with this. I am just not sure it is worth it though, with such a small site. I want to find some other way to build value into my site for search engines. I am working on link popularity, but that doesn’t seem to be happening fast enough to get decent results.

By the way I am not bidding on Adwords or any other PPC program. They have not worked well for me. Additionally, the bad publicity that they have had seems to show that even the big companies are likely to rip us off. I just think that, from what I have heard about Adwords, (whether it is true or not) that I need to find some new ways of getting search engines interested in my site.
If I am wrong about google and adwords then please don't focus on that, I still need my main reasons for posting this answered.

[IgorMordkovich]

I don't think that Google created SiteMaps to favor sites that use it and neglect the ones that don't. SiteMaps was created for those websites that were large enough for Google's spider to miss pages when it spidered.

If you have a sitemap on your home page, google should be able to spider all of your pages and thus there is no need for the Google SiteMaps.

Google does though gives you information when you use their sitemap. It's your choice whether you need that info or not.

Once again, I believe that Google site map is for those websites that have thousands of products or categories and google simply doesn't see them or misses them on a regular basis.

In terms of Google Adwords and ranking the ad higher based on your sitemap. I think it's B.S. Adwords ranks your ad based on your landing page, your max bid, your ad, CTR and daily budget (hint, hint) the bigger the budget, the more of it Google will want.

[seminhouse]

Google Sitemaps has a lot of insightful information that you might be able to use. It's not just to tell Google about the pages on your site.

For example, they tell you the average top position yof our site was for the keywords driving traffic to your site.

It also identifies any pages that give Googlebot errors.

If you use the robots.txt, it has a feature to check it to make sure everything is written accurately.


However, if you're getting indexed and not a full-time SEO and/or SEO is not the top on your list of priorities... Then, this may not be the lowest hanging fruit for you to pursue at this time. Keep it on the list, but put it toward the bottom. ;)

[glengara]

*I don't think that Google created SiteMaps to favor sites that use it and neglect the ones that don't.*

True enough, but much like the rel=nofollow there seems to be a bit of mission-creep coming in, particularly in the linkage area.

FWIW, I've a new 20-30 page site kicking-off shortly and have no intention of submitting a site map...

[eukhost]

But i have different point of view , be on the safer side by acting upon all the tasks for the search engines indexing.
Well as i take it, precaution is better than treatment. :D

shane

[JEC]

I'm not sure what to make of Google Sitemaps anymore. There have been plenty of discussions on this topic and a few months ago Mikkel deMib Svendsen indicated that he wouldn't use the sitemap XML anymore due to some bad experiences that he had with a number of sites (thread can be found here http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=12061). After considering his experience, I decided to try and turn off my Google sitemap and see if anything happened. My 100 or so page site went from the 60's to page 2 or 3 in about a week, with no other changes implemented. I never turned the sitemap back on and we continue to hover around at least page 3, but mostly page 2.

Perhaps it was just the size of my site that Google didn't like. Maybe I was just too small for them. At any rate, it wasn't getting all of my pages indexed before I used sitemaps and after I started using it, we got most of the pages indexed. Haven't checked on the number of pages indexed in a while, but I'm liking the higher positioning more than the number of pages indexed. I think it was a good trade.

JEC