Hey gang,

There's something in my mind for the last few days that is bothering me.
I'm more a programmer than a seo'er, so I don't know how to take it, but so many peoples are telling everybody to use a sitemap, how does it get when your pages are dynamically created / generated on the fly ?

I mean, I use mod_rewrite almost on every sites I create, and a lot of pages are just redirect from the DB content.
For exemple http://site.com/article/category/title/.
Say I have 30'000 articles in my DB, should I create a 30'000 nodes sitemap ?

How do you handle those sites with a sitemap ?
Do you even put a sitemap on them ? And what exactly, apart the bandwidth lighter usage and the time to reflect changes do the sitemap

Do you need a sitemap for the SEs?

Does your navigation create obstacles for crawling?
Are there any reasons why you can't create "on site" sitemaps?

Half the problem is (as usual) the "experts" jumping on a bandwagon and touting the merits of the latest and greatest "thing". Currently it's sitemaps, a while back it was "Search Engine Friendly" URLs, but of course the majority of the ones spewing out the miracle advice really have no idea how or why this is supposed to help.

Thanks for the highlight Chris.

Do you need a sitemap for the SEs?

In my mind, I have a shouting "no !" that pops out directly.
Most of the pages I want to be viewed are indexed, and the linking between the categories is made correctly enough for the SE to crawl new pages in a relative short time.

I'm clearly standing on the SE friendly side of the line, and as I don't mind having 400+ googlebot hits a day, this don't appears to be a problem for me.

It was just that I have heard so many talk about this hype, that I was wondering if I had overlooked something.

Are there any reasons why you can't create "on site" sitemaps?

Not sure of the meaning of the "on site" here (french speaker here...), but if you mean generating a dynamicall sitemap, no there would be no problems.
But as the googlebot will see those "new pages" anyway, I don't see where the problem is.

Use what I call the "Three Rule"; if your navigation and structure is such that you can reach any page on your site within 3 clicks from the home page, you should be fine.

A lot of the time, this is simply a matter of setting up proper recordset paging...as stupid and mundane as it sounds, this is where a large number of sites end up "supplementalized" or with pages not indexed.

Given all that, you have no real need for a sitemap, it will be extra work for no benefit whatsoever.

That's exactly what I mean by "on site" site maps. Ones that are created directly from your DB and linked in with the site navigation.

Well, not any pages.
Those at the far end are all within a 4 "pure" (<a> tags, no js) clicks from the top.

But hey, 3 or 4, what's the difference. As long as they are not burried belows 25 layers of flash/javascript...

The difference is that 3 appears to be the magic number after which people get tired of trying to find stuff, unless they're really into your site and repeat visitors and stuff. I'm not sure why that is; it just is. I guess because 4 is 33% more work (4/3) than 3.