How To Configure Sitemap Autodiscovery For Your Website
By Gerard McGarry on 12th April 2007, filed in Internet Technologies, Search Engine Optimisation. You can leave a response below.
I read over on ProNet today that all the major search engines have now announced support for autodiscovery of sitemaps via the robots.txt file.
Since I use WordPress for a lot of my sites, I use the Sitemap Generator plugin to automatically create a sitemap. If you’re using any other content management system or – God forbid – manually managing your content, you may have to manually create a sitemap file or find a way to automate the process. I wrote a tutorial on creating a sitemap for ASP.NET applications a while back.
Anyway, once you’ve got a sitemap configured and working, all you need to do now is modify your robots.txt file and add the line:
SITEMAP: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
Save the robots.txt file back to your web server and the search engines will take care of the rest.
Benefits Of Using A Sitemap
- Autodiscovery means you don’t have to manage submission to the major search engines and any others that may adopt the sitemaps standard.
- Providing a sitemap may prevent spiders unnecessarily crawling your website, reducing load on the server and bandwidth usage.
- The sitemaps protocol allows you to identify important pages in your site and specify which ones are updated more frequently. This allows the spiders to crawl your site more intelligently.
I should just add the standard disclaimer that publishing a sitemap to the search engines does not guarantee that your site will be indexed. Nor is it a way to achieve higher rankings. It simply provides an inventory of all the pages on your website to the search engines.
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