If everyone else jumped off a bridge would you? lol Just kidding

Seriously though, A-listers and “guru’s” don’t always make the right decisions. When an a-listers makes a poor decision or a guess, thousands of others see that and do the same thing.

So now people see “everyone” doing it and think they should too.

Also, some things word for some sites, and other things work or others.

Testing is your best best! As far as sitemaps go though, this post should give you a pretty good idea through my own testing.

Valid points. I do submit XML sitemaps for my article directories and I believe they have contributed alot to the indexed pages within.

Article Directories and other CMS’s that are similar will benefit more than anything from sitemaps.

Thanks for linking the new directory.

I think that for those running a WP blog on a domain and nothing else, a sitemap is probably not necessary, although as RT points out, using a plugin won’t do any damage and always made me feel more comfortable – logical or not.

I’ve found that since I started using a free sitemap service, I’ve done a little better with the other SE’s although that could purely be coincidence of course. Either way, the maps are updated regularly and automatically uploaded to my server, so keeping them is not a hassle and, as you say, with the directory online, they might be a little more important now.

Great original post.

That being said, the loss of toolbar PR wouldn’t affect anything at all (other than advertising rates.)

However, if a page loses actual PR (authority) it would indeed affect the rankings site-wide.

I think it’s important to remember each page is indexed on an individual basis. As each post is around long enough, it will get its own PR and Alexa ranking. As you said, duplicate content is one of the things that can hurt you, and so can the quality of your links. So with that in mind those who drop in PR by might be dropping because their main page is linked to so many pages with a low PR (their own posts!).

Hmm. I think I’m going to write something about this. lol

Terry

@ RT – I agree

@ Scott – Thanks and good luck!

@ Stephen – There’s nothing wrong with having one as long as you don’t have dupe pages or other pages that shouldn’t be indexed included in your sitemap. I’m just saying they’re worthless if your internal linking structure is set up how it should be Actually, the major players don’t look at the frequency requests. They’re smart enough to figure out on their own when a page needs updated. Matt Cutts talked about it at one point in time. I wish I could post a link, but I honestly have no idea where I saw that (it was a while ago.)

@ Terry – Thanks Terry. Thanks for setting it up for me all those month ago when I hardly knew what a blog was

I’ve heard that you can just point it out in robots.txt Probably should have added that in here, but since I don’t send a sitemap to Google (or any SE) I didn’t think much of it.

btw, I use Lucia’s Link Love to dofollow comments, so after 3 comments you’ll have link juice.

The blog looks great. Funny, but I just wrote about sitemaps today on one of my blogs (Coffeeblogger). In the process, I learned you don’t have to submit your sitemap.xml to Google anymore. They can automatically detect it if you have a robots.txt file in place.

Terry