To put as much info as possible on the table, it's worth
noting that:
(a) in the recent session on this at SES, the Ask.com rep
pointed out
that the vast majority of sites using Sitemaps today are in
fact spam
or spammy sites. Overall, on "good" or
"trusted" sites, adoption is
low currently (10-15%).;
(b) does this mean that using one can actually throw
suspicion on you?
No, the search engine reps were all adamant about this. By
definition,
they're making a distinction between well rated sites, and
very low
trust sites. If you're not in the latter category, using a
Sitemap
won't put you there. But it does suggest that if you are a
spammy
site, they're using your Sitemaps behavior to gain added
strategic
info about spammer types. It also means they're currently
overwhelmed
with data so it is unlikely that Sitemaps is going to turn
out to be a
panacea unless something changes in the environment or the
design of
Sitemaps. But that "something" probably winds up
looking like paid
inclusion, which is no solution, especially not if SEO's
with "trusted
identities and logins" begin selling them 
Andrew
On Dec 16, 10:15 pm, Jon Henshaw <hens... gmail.com> wrote:
> I generally don't concern myself with sitemaps unless
the website is
> new or doesn't get crawled very well. Every discussion
I've had with a
> Google Sitemap Engineer (a total of 2 live discussions)
has led me to
> believe that they are of little to know use for sites
that already
> have good information architecture (IA) and are
currently well
> indexed.
>
> As for whether or not they actually can harm the
performance of a
> site, I'm thinking that's probably just the healthy
paranoia of a
> search marketer. I think the best way is to focus on
your IA and to
> channel traffic and emphasis to the parts of your
website you want to
> perform best. That means actually using
rel="nofollow" on portions of
> your site that you don't care about or cover topics
that aren't
> related to your conversion and SERP performance goals.
>
> Jon Henshaw
> Internet Strategist
> Sitening -http://sitening.com
>
> On Dec 12, 4:14 pm, Adam Audette <p...audettemedia.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm wondering if anyone has experience using XML
sitemap feeds for
> > sites over 30,000 pages. Specifically, what sort
of improvements in
> > crawling and/or indexing (or even ranking) have
you tracked? We did a
> > site that was about 30k pages this summer and
noted some improvements
> > in indexing time (faster crawling), but overall it
hasn't had a
> > significant impact.
>
> > Intuitively it just makes sense to push content
into the engines
> > rather than wait for them to find it. And I'm sure
with dynamic sites
> > that have crawling roadblocks it helps a bunch,
but I'm not convinced
> > XML sitemaps really make that big of a difference.
I'd love to hear
> > otherwise.
>
> > There are even those who contend that adding a
sitemap can actually
> > hinder a site in some way. For awhile I was
reading advice to verify
> > your site in Google Webmaster Tools but not submit
a feed. Any
> > changing views on this? It seems if a site has big
problems (like
> > loads of dupe content) that creating a feed would
allow googlebot to
> > discover those issues perhaps easier.
>
> > -Adam Audette
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