[Dr.Marie]

I was reading through the quality guidelines and saw this:

"Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages."

I submit sitemaps to Google for my sites but I don't usually have one on my site. I found this video (although it is a few years old) where Matt Cutts explains that having an html sitemap is not only good for users to find things on your site but also helps Google with crawling your site.



For those of you who use an html sitemap, do you use an online generator, or do you create one manually?

[Test-ok]

I know this isn't an answer to your question.
I believe it's better to use your site as a site map. Every page having a link to the important pages.
With good internal links, there's no reason for a site map. Unless your site is huge with 100's of important pages.
IMO a site map isn't an answer in making the users experience easier...internal links do it just fine, in fact better.

[KernelPanic]

I stopped doing xml and html sitemaps years ago. Google will find all the pages of your site and rank them if they are promoted properly with or without a sitemap. If they are not promoted correctly no amount of sitemaps will help it rank

[SEO_AM]

I have never seen the need or had a site map for our site. We have several hundred thousand pages with thousands of deep links. The deep links causes the bots to index a large portion of those deep pages.

[KernelPanic]

There is one good reason to have an XML site map: SEO Scammers will email website owners and make them believe their SEO service is not doing a good job because they don't have one. Then I get an email.....

[eddyf]

To me, this falls under the category of "it can't hurt", so why not. It's simple, and both can be automatically generated. I have both a site map page for my visitors and XML for the bots.

Cutts could simply say, "Don't bother" if it didn't matter. But as far as I know, Google still recommends a site map.

Ed

[joshz]

I do HTML sitemaps for content heavy sites for UX.

[C.Rebecca]

Yes, I do have an html Sitemap on my website. The reason for having an html Sitemap is providing good user experience. Some of my website are old, large and does not have very good structure.
In such cases, I believe html Sitemaps helps a lot in finding what he is looking for.

[jeremyclark]

Good internal linking structure will help google bot to easily understand your site structure and the importance of pages.For user,you should have to create html sitemap so user can easily navigate to your important pages.So i prefer both kind of site map for my website. .xml and .html

[grgmathew]

In any case having a html sitemap in the website wont harm any webmaster. Just from my experience, there had been many occasions when a sitemap has shown me the way to correct page what i was looking for. In case if sitemap is not there, users finding tough to get to a particular page will simply run away.

[Test-ok]

Originally Posted by grgmathew;

In any case having a html sitemap in the website wont harm any webmaster. Just from my experience, there had been many occasions when a sitemap has shown me the way to correct page what i was looking for. In case if sitemap is not there, users finding tough to get to a particular page will simply run away.

That's exactly it. The user should be able to find the link on the page or throughout the site as easy as it is in the site map. If it isn't make it so it is. I think most people will go elsewhere before using a site map to find what there looking for, which you came up for in some link or search...or they wouldn't be there in the first place.

Some of my website are old, large and does not have very good structure.

It would be of more value to fix the structure opposed to using a site map to help with that issue.

For those of you who use an html sitemap, do you use an online generator, or do you create one manually?

Sorry Marie for hijacking your thread. And I see your question still isn't answered.

[Louis Wheeler]

Html sitemaps is all I use, and I put that single link at the bottom of every page of the website (which is usually 2500 webpages per website).

All the sitemaps are structured and topic categorized for user and Google happiness.

One main sitemap ->-> multiple master topic sitemaps ->-> the list of URL's (in each of the master sitemaps) and it works great. [You can see what I mean in my "visitors message" on my profile page].

[secretagentdad]

I get the whole it cant hurt argument, but why not just make user friendly "directory" pages that act as site maps.