Site maps play an important role in assisting all spiders, not just Google to locate your content and can be beneficial for many different reasons. Here are only two:
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· If you have deep content, four or more layers, a site map can create shallower paths. Content reached by shallow paths, only one or two clicks from the home page, will be spidered more completely more frequently.
· If you have a web site that uses session identifications in the URLs, for example a shopping cart, and you do not want to use Mod Rewrite, a sitemap can lead spiders to each static address, or on the shopping cart to each product, in a manner that is easily index able. This will maximize your spider able content.
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Because of the behavior of search spiders, each site map should have no more than 100 links on it. Should you need additional sitemaps, cross-linking each site map to one another can be helpful.
Of course, should your web site contain thousands of pages you may need one or more site maps just to index all of your site maps. If this is the case, place links to ten different site maps on every site map page that links to actual content. This will help to increase the spider ability of all of your sitemaps and give them any benefits derived by additional internal links.
Do use Google Site Maps. If you can easily create XML maps with all their extra information then you should do so. Otherwise, a simple text file listing each web page can be easy to produce and effective.
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