Sitemap Submission

[Gordon N]

I really am bricking it here - going to ask a question to the professional SEOs and I know what you lot are like once you get started!

I am very familiar with sitemaps, how they are structured, how they work and all that, as you would expect in my line of work - but I was chatting with Stu on messenger earlier about something that I would be interested in others opinions on.

I have always updated my sitemaps and let the big G or whoever pick them up and when the desire, or occasionally used a url to ping a sitemap at one of the engines when I launch a new site. I am aware though that you can use forced url submission for most of the search engines if you feel the need, rather than just listing them on Webmaster Tools, Site Explorer and the likes.

Having recently switched my site onto wordpress I have spent a lot of time flicking through plugins to automate as many bits and pieces as possible - one of which being sitemaps. Most of the plugins have an auto submit feature where they attempt to notify the engines of an updated map as and when it happens. I say attempt as the one I am using seems to be a little hit or miss at that part!

Is there any pros/cons to forced submissions, do the big guys prefer to take maps when they want and not be constantly bothered by "I've got another update for you!" messages...

What are opinons/findings on this one?

[Gordon now stands back and waits for the professional disagreements to commence! - only kidding guys!]

 

[Boxby]

Hi

I have been adding a lot of pages recently to boxby, and they have been getting indexed very quickly. I haven't yet submitted the site map to google, and my developer hasn't submitted it either for probably a year.

When I add new pages, I make sure that they are included in my ordinary website sitemap, and linked into either the main, the sub home pages if possible. But at leasted linked into a couple of pages.

It seems to be working. Within a couple of days the new pages always seem indexed.

 

[StevenAitchison]

Hi Gordon

I run a number of wordpress sites for small businesses and there is really no need for a sitemap if you are using wordpress. Google loves wordpress and it will be indexed very quickly as long as you are regularly updating the contentn and pinging every post.

My own site gets indexed within 15 - 30 minutes of making a post, I know that sounds a bit hyped but it's true.

So once your wordpress site is up and running after a few months you can go straight to Google's first page within a matter of hours. If you also link to your site with the keyphrases you, and providing you have done your SEO correctly, you could be dominating google for your search term, depending on the competition of course.

Hope this helps.

Steve

 

[stuarty]

Gordon,

Don't use any auto sitemap tools especially with wordpress (you'll notice that we specialise in WP seo/sem).

Get the pingpressFM plugin. Get yourself an API (instructions in the plugin),download the wordpress ping list from our site (or any other updated ping list). You'll need to set up triggers based on your own preferences. Let your posts do all the work for you.

We've heard recently about pages being dropped from Google's results shortly after people submit sitemaps and I've heard about it on the SEO forums but I have not done any investigation as to why. We never submit sitemaps ever and it's never done us any harm. Your choice though.