Let's say I have submitted my site's sitemap to google, How often do I ned to recreate my sitemap and submit it to google? Or will google automatically get updated?

link to it in the robots.txt then the bot will check it periodically. recreate it whenever there has been pages added IF the new pages aren't being crawled.

Most sitemaps nowadays are updated automatically. You don't need to resubmit it every now and then.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

link to it in the robots.txt then the bot will check it periodically. recreate it whenever there has been pages added IF the new pages aren't being crawled.

Can you further elaborate how to do it?

Hi there

I dont even bother with sitemaps anymore, they are more trouble than its worth, so long as your site is set up properly it should get crawled anyhow

Woc

I don't bother it too much, if the Google spider visit your site periodically.

Originally Posted by Swinger

I don't bother it too much, if the Google spider visit your site periodically.

Do you mean that it is ok not to have sitemap? My forum get crawld regularly by google. Will it make my site get crawled more frequently if I submit a sitemap to google?

Hi

Yes its ok not to have a site map, so long as the spiders can follow the links on ur website to all ur pages, will it get ur site crawled more frequently, well who knows !

I dont use a site map and my site gets crawled regualrly. So if your worried about sitemaps, really the best solution i think is not to use one lol !

Woc

Originally Posted by kenang82

Do you mean that it is ok not to have sitemap? My forum get crawld regularly by google. Will it make my site get crawled more frequently if I submit a sitemap to google?

Yes it is & No it won't

My site gets crawled daily and my sitemap is not even complete. If you add fresh content to your site everyday it will be crawled everyday. And when you have an active forum, like you do, with lots of new posts, you should see Googlebot, MSN bot & Yahoo show up in your stats.

Is a sitemap in Google's webmaster tools all that important?

Our site has been online for almost two years now without it. And we're in top 5 for a few different search phrases.

The content is updated from time to time, so I would think you would need to keep updating the sitemap.xml file to Google. That seems like a painstaken task.

Is a sitemap on webmaster tools more for newer sites?
And how valuable is it to have?

There is not any hard and fast rule to submit your sitemap in Google webmaster tools. If your website architecture is good and you are updating content regularly, then you do not need to worry about updating your sitemap.

But in just opposite case, if the website navigation architecture in not good, then how crawler will move to deep internal pages and crawl those pages. In that case we submit our sitemap to google webmaster tools to let Google know about our website existing links and then crawler move directly to that link to get crawled that page..

There is ONLY one instance where a XML sitemap is of any real use and that is on big sites where the pages are several "clicks" away from the root. It will give crawlers an alternative entry point into the site and allow the "discovery" of alternate paths into the pages. Those pages may then get indexed and appear in the SERPs for non-competitive "long tail" phrases but if the pages are in a competitive arena, "fixing" the navigation is the better option

You could of course do exactly the same thing by having HTML sitemaps linked from the home page and therefore help visitors to find the products they would like to buy as well. HTML sitemap = real links with real anchor text.

Well, It is good if you are using Google sitemap for easy crawling. Indexing of pages also depend on the website services.