Sitemap vs No sitemap - the ultimate test - PART 1
Posted at
September 5th, 2010
We have received a couple of (10+) e-mails over the last few months from (potential)
users of
freesitemapgenerator.com
with more or less the same question: Should I create a
sitemap for my site? Google says you should - so you
should, see our
links
page but do sitemaps actually work? A year ago we posted a
message on this page with some nice graphics of howmany
pages were indexed by google before and after
submitting a sitemap but now we are ready for a real double
blind test!
For a customer we created a program to generate
a sitemap for their database driven travel site. Each
subdomain contains more or less the same information but in
another language and has
125,000 unique urls. All
subdomains are linked only from the English homepage and
will not be promoted on their own. Our educated guess is
that all subdomains will have about the same number of
pages indexed by Yahoo!, Google and Bing. For two of the
subdomains we did not submit the sitemap and did not upload
it to the webserver. They just don't exist and all the
spiders should try to figure out themselves all the
possible urls. Now we wait. In about a month we will report
the number of indexed pages for these subdomains. We don't take
bets.
(and yes, our client knows about this test - we will add the last two sitemaps when this test is concluded)
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