Sitemap vs No sitemap - the ultimate test - PART 2

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0200
Computers/Internet/Searching/Search_Engines

Last month we posted an article on a generated sitemap for a very large site (125,000 pages per subdomain), Read more. Now a month (almost) has passed, and we are ready to publish the first results. See the image with the number of indexed pages per subdomain.
In words: the two top lines are the two subdomains for which we created and submitted a sitemap. Indexing was fast, within a week a total of 35,000 pages were in Google's index. For the English subdomain, which is 'www' (3rd line) it took a week longer to get indexed and it seems to take more time to get the pages crawled. It now has passed the 5000 line, while the two subdomains are declining. The other lines at the bottom are the subdomains we did not submit a sitemap for. With just one site tested, for a very short period, we do not want to give you any hard conclusions, but our opinion still is: a sitemap helps getting your site indexed.
The fancy graph was generated by Microsoft Excel :-)