Need Advice: Site map, pros cons?

[ikester7579]

I tried using a sitemap plugin for wordpress and it cut down the crawl and actual traffic. And my rank (1st page 1-3rd listing) on the search engine suffered (1st page 6th listing) as well. So I deleted the file in hopes things go back to normal.

Is a site map file good to use?

And is there a good site map generator? I see sites on the internet offering to generate one for you, except for some reason they want to host the file which I found strange. Or they say the file will only work if I host with them (which I'm not changing hosts just for that).

[Guilo]

Re: Site map, pros cons?

Sitemaps can help improve your site's ranking on google and such but only if they are done correctly, a good place to start is google's webmaster tools, the sitemap generator they have there is rather good. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

[VisualWordSeries]

Re: Site map, pros cons?

There are also WordPress templates that come with built-in site maps. In addition, there are WordPress site map plugins - one in particular that I have used is DD-Site Map Generator. I use it on this site http://www.makeaapp.net and it has not affected rankings at all. Many of those pages rank well and it is a new site.

[bdh]

Re: Site map, pros cons?

And my rank (1st page 1-3rd listing) on the search engine suffered (1st page 6th listing) as well. So I deleted the file in hopes things go back to normal.

This is pretty common. It goes back to normal usually after a few weeks.

[sethknorr]

Re: Site map, pros cons?

The advantage of a site map is to allow search engines to be able to index every page on your site, in case it was not picked up from your standard links. This is especially true for dynamically created pages (ie. PHP, CGI, etc…), it’s a huge plus. The main downside is if the page names change, Google will have issues until your site is re-indexed and they pick up on what the new page names on your site are.

Regards,

Seth Knorr

Search the Bible in a fast and efficient way.
SmartBibleSearch.com

[ikester7579]

Re: Site map, pros cons?

I deleted the site map file because of what it did to my ranking on the search engine. I put back up a bot file instead and my site ranking went up. I now have number one spot when you do a YEC search: http://www.google.com/search?q=yec&i...ient=firefox-a

And now Google has done something else, which I don't know if it's common or not, but when you Google my site it's categorized.
http://www.google.com/search?q=yeche...ient=firefox-a

Which it never was before. Since the bot file seems to work better for me, I am leery about trying to go back when all this was established after I got rid of the sitemap file and use only the bot file.