During a call with a client today an interesting question was posed: Is there any value in submitting a Google Sitemap?
For those who don't know, Google now offers users a way to submit an XML based sitemap of their website to help encourage Googlebot crawling. Yahoo offers similar functionality by looking for a text file called urllist.txt which contains a list of all your site's URLs. Yahoo! will then look for this list as it comes to index your site.
So if the search engines offer you a way to list all your URLs why would you want to bother with traditional SEO efforts like improved navigation and HTML sitemaps?