A while back I wrote a post about the need for having a sitemap to let search engines, especially Google, know that you exist and the contents of your site. I mentioned there one of the biggest advantages was that sitemaps are a great way to get crawled before you’ve actually built up any links to your site from other people.
Here’s the flip side–a recent Daily Blog Tips Q&A makes the case for not having a sitemap. Notice Daniel doesn’t say sitemaps can really hurt you outside of some instances where crawl rate could possibly be decreased, but he does say that using a really good link structure makes them less necessary.
On most of my sites I don’t use Sitemaps because I always try to have an efficient internal link structure in place. For example on Daily Blog tips every single page of the site is accessible within 2 clicks of the homepage.
Well…
It doesn’t hurt to have a hugely popular blog like DBT with lots of people linking to you either. I still say, when in doubt, sitemap it. And definitely create a sitemap for any new sites you build.
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