Search Engine Sitemaps Update
By Keith Hickman
Apr 24, 2007, 19:08
Search Engine Sitemaps Update
As of April 11th there is no longer a need to manually submit your sitemap to search engines. Last year, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask agreed on a sitemaps format.
You can now add a simple line to your robots.txt file and let the engines know where your sitemap document resides on your site.
Just include the following line in your robots.txt file and you should be all set:
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Obviously, you still need to create your sitemap. One of the best tools for auto generation of a sitemap is located at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ Follow the instructions there to create a compliant XML sitemap for the search engines.
Another nice desktop Sitemap tool is at http://gsitecrawler.com/ It also offers other options such as RSS, HTML Sitemaps and more.
More details on the sitemap propocol can be found at http://www.sitemaps.org/
Sitemaps are important in helping the search engine find all of your pages. However, neither autodiscovery via Robots Text file nor manual submission will guarantee pages will be added to the index. The pages must meet specified quality criteria for inclusion in the index. Use of these submission methods does not influence ranking.
If you still want to submit your sitemaps manually, Use the following URL's
Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html Must sign up for a Google Account to proceed.
Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites Must sign up for a Yahoo Account to proceed.
MSN: No Direct link - Use Robots file. It is supported.
Ask: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=SitemapUrl (where SitemapUrl = the path to your sitemap.
Example: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
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