Is adding selected pages to the sitemap enough to allow a full crawl?

[raj7]

Hi,

I'm considering having a sitemap, but not including all the pages in the siteamp (simply because pages are added at quite a frequent rate).

If I add the main pages to the sitemap, is that enough? Will the spiders crawl from those main pages to to pages off the site map to give a full crawl?

Thank you in advance,

Kind regards

Raj

[beu]

Do you mean a "site sitemap" or a "Google Sitemap"?

[raj7]

Sorry for the confusion.

I mean a google sitemap.

[seoimage]

The point of the xml site map is to make all pages available from one page or access point that will be in a format to make it easier for Search Engine spiders to find all your pages. So limiting this would pretty much defeat the purpose and may even make spidering all your pages less frequent.

If your building numerous pages, you can paginate the sitemap and create a sitemap index page. You can also tell the Search Engienes your specific priority for specific and more important pages.

Technical Information and FAQs can be found here:
http://www.sitemaps.org/
and here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/?hl=en

[Thomas Schulz MS]

Search Engienes your specific priority for specific and more important pages.

If you choose to include priority information in your sitemaps, you can have priority values calculated (http://www.micro-sys.dk/developer/articles/xml-sitemap-priority-tag.php) for you based on the internal linking structure of your website. A good option for most I think.

Anyways, how many pages do you have? And how many are you adding at a frequent rate? I think Google will find your "primary" pages anyways, so XML sitemaps make best sense if you include all pages including recent.