> Isn't that just to get your pages into the index in > cases where they > might not be found, though? Doesn't affect your > position in the SERPS > according to Google. Do you know of specific > examples that Google's > spider might find "hard to reach"? >From what I have heard, as search engines have a ton of sites to crawl, they sometimes will only crawl a couple of pages per site (most recently updated pages, pages with the most links coming from outside) and try to get to the rest later (I have no idea when). Hence the use of Google sitemap could help as the search bot crawl your website quickly as it does not have to follow every link to find every page. I did recently get out of the "Google Sandbox" and blogged about it here: http://www.sinletter.com/blogComment.aspx?id=16 Given below is a list of very interesting free tools that helped me gauge my progress and improve my rankings. 1. To determine the popularity of certain keywords along with suggestions for different ones. http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ 2. To check your rankings on various search engines for specific keywords. http://www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm 3. A link popularity checker. http://www.link-popularity-checker.com/ 4. The mother of all directory listings (for finance). http://www.directories.myfinancedirectory.com/index.php?c=1 5. A listing of blog directories and networks. http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ 6. Automatically ping various blog networks after writing a blog. http://pingomatic.com/ http://www.pingtheempire.com/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com