Sitemaps: Public or Private ?

I've generally not been one to use sitemaps in the past as I've always been absolutely sure every page on the site was accessible from no more than one page deep into the site.

Recently I've had to change that though as a site in question is going to have roughly 66% of its' pages being ternary destinations.

I'm leary about using a public sitemap though, one of the things that's turned me off on sitemaps is that they make it harder to catch site scrapers in the act. It's easy to identify scraper bahavior if they have to build their own index, it's nearly impossible to do it if you've just handed them all of the site URLs on a silver platter.

I know most search engines have places where I can submit the URL for my sitemap(s) which makes it easy to keep the sitemaps private. But, I've also seen quite a few sites that display their sitemaps in their footer which makes me wonder, is there some sort of benefit to using a public sitemap ?

Breadcrumbs are more useful than public sitemap.But public sitemaps makes navigation much easier.

Public sitemaps is essential since it assists web crawlers to navigate a website. It is useful especially if you have poor navigation and on-page SEO, submitting a Sitemap might be your only alternative.

To me public sitemap is essential.

public sitemap is important and easy for us who's navigation system is poor and it allow us to navigate the sitemap, much easier than other.

Submitting a sitemap make faster crawling of your website.

Sometime the website is very big and user not navigate it in a proper way so in this case sitemap helpful to reach the exact internal page of the website. Sitemap also give the proper path crawling for the search engine robots.