I saw a comment on another blog from a new Webmaster who was frustrated about his lack of traffic. He recently submitted a sitemap to Google and Yahoo and wondered why his traffic hadn’t increased. So he titled his blog comment, “Sitemaps Don’t Increase Traffic!”.
There’s a lot of misunderstandings when it comes to sitemaps. I think many people believe it’s an instant way to improve their search engine rankings, even though none of the search engines that accept sitemaps have ever confirmed such a thing.
In fact, Google flat out tells you in their FAQ’s they have no impact on your rankings.
So Why Bother With Sitemaps?
There are a couple of good reasons to bother with them. First of all, it’s a quick way to inform the engines of your new content and enables the spiders to pick up your content as soon as it’s published.
Second, I believe having a sitemaps shows a bit of Webmaster responsibility which could give your site some credibility. Now there’s no proof of this, but a part of me believes taking the time to generate a sitemap lets the engines know you are a more serious Webmaster compared to someone who doesn’t bother.
Not to mention, creating and submitting them won’t cost you a cent. So why wouldn’t you create a sitemap? You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. Just don’t expect an instant explosion of traffic just because you have one.
Achieving good search engine rankings still largely depends on your content and how many quality inbound links pointing to your site. Nothing has changed there. But having a sitemap is still a great way to get your site talking to the engine spiders and letting them know about your new content as soon as its published.
And I don’t know about you, but any time I get a chance to “talk” to Google about my site, I take advantage of it. 
Learn more about creating and submitting Google Sitemaps.
Learn more about creating and submitting Yahoo Sitemaps.
Automatically generate a Yahoo and Google sitemap instantly.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I got the site map… Is there any trick to it? Should I have adsense ads on it?
You cannot add Google AdSense ads to your sitemap. It’s an internal XML file that you register with the search engines to help them spider/index your pages faster.
Since I been using sitemaps, Google has crawled my pages more often. I think it’s just a better way for a search engine to find all the content on the site especially the new pages. So I believe in a way it does improve traffic, but in a very small degree…
How do you submit a sitemap for a blog?
-Webman
Wordpress has a plugin that does it for you. If you’re using Blogger, here’s an article that may help
http://theos.in/hakuna-matata/adding-google-sitemap-to-bloggercom-blog-account/
Thanks Lis:)
Follow on Twitter: @Tanhak
Thanks for the lame concepts on doing things that don’t provide any results. Whom do you converse with at google, the email forms or the FAQs.
Don’t bother with sitemaps