One of our customers had traffic in the range of 950 visits a day. This was consistent for about a year. Being a large site with about 180,000 pages, they were quiet perplexed as to why the traffic was not increasing.
On analysis, we found that the key problem was indexing in Google itself. The site was not made for search engines. Everything that Google hates, was implemented on the site with great style. The number of pages in Google was less than 290. It required no NASA science to figure this out.
Once the mistakes were fixed and the site was optimized for search engines, the traffic increased to about 1,400 visits/day and index size became over 2,800. However when the customer looked at his competition’s site numbers, he went ballistic. Compared to his rivals, the traffic on his site was in decimals.
This is where Google Sitemap stepped in. We wrote a program to dynamically generate all the URLs of the site. And then placed it (with due reverence) at the feet of Google.
After submitting the Google sitemap, the number of pages in Google index increased from 2,800 to 29,000 in less than 2 days. Then came the big one. A week later, the indexing increased to 127,000+. There was no stopping from then on.
The traffic spiked up like crazy.
Now isn’t this the ‘The Inhuman Power of Google Sitemap’?
Note however, that it is important to fundamentally optimize the site for search engines before you take to this big bang route. Else the results can be disastrous.