: For larger website, for example website with hundreds, thousands or millions of pages, it is quite useful. We had in our company site with 400 000 pages where URLs were dynamically created

For larger website, for example website with hundreds, thousands or millions of pages, it is quite useful. We had in our company site with 400 000 pages where URLs were dynamically created by content ID and URL parameters were used with &, Google Webmaster Tools will provide you with feedback on crawled pages and show you errors, you can debug or open the page and see for yourself what is wrong. This way Google actually helped us make a better website and spared us from huge embarrassment few times.

It is also useful to see number of indexed pages vs. number of crawled.

For smaller websites, if website is a small group of .html pages where each page is linked through menu and site is not frequently updated, if you upload sitemap, nothing will change against search results. You will not have any advantage of having sitemap uploaded over somebody who did not upload sitemap.

I also used to have about 20 small websites, where I had sitemaps generated by cron script automatically and I stopped doing that. One day I found out that XML files are not generated correctly for about 6 months by my mistake, but Google did thankfully ignore my mistake and indexed these websites fully even when sitemaps had errors, Google uses sitemap just as a hint where to go, not very seriously.

10% popularity Vote Up Vote Down