Sitemap for webshop?

[zarkas]

Had a client today who contacted me regarding having no sitemap on his webshop (with about 2000 products). He told me that his design company, who had made his webshop, adviced him against putting up a site since it would be giving google to much information at once, hence making it stop visiting his webshop as much?

Well my first through was -okay this must be some kind of joke.
But with seo, there are always something, now and then, that still surprises you, So are there anyone else here, who could share some info on this?

[zarkas]

My thoughts exactly, never heard of any bad effects of having a sitemap if you don't mind your pages getting indexed. But glad to hear it wasn't just me who had missed a chapter in the big book of SEO.

[Dr-Pete]

I assume you mean an XML sitemap (in Google Webmaster Tools)? The only information that really contains is the URLs on the site. So, if, for some reason, you don't want Google to know about the pages on your site, then I guess a sitemap is a bad idea. If you want your pages to be indexed, though, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

I will say that I think it's important to focus your sitemap and definitely don't use non-canonical URLs or pages you don't want indexed. It should be a "clean" list, so to speak.

Some people don't think you should have a GWT account at all, but I find that to be pure paranoia in 99% of cases. If you're going to rank on Google, they need to know about your site. Even if you're pursuing black-hat tactics, I don't see what information the root account or sitemap would contain that would harm you.