Sitemap Spider Food
SEO April 26th, 2007
Just a reminder, you no longer have to go to Google or Yahoo to submit your sitemap file location manually. The major engines have (mercifully) agreed to a common sitemap protocol that allows the spiders to find your sitemap file by way of your robots.txt file (for a change, robots.txt tells the spiders where to go instead of where NOT to go).
Just place this line in your robots.txt file and you’re set:
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Naturally, you need to change the yourdomain.com to whatever your actual domain is.
Sitemap files are terrific for getting all of the pages on your site found by the search engines. If you’ve got a large site and want a free way to spider it and generate a sitemap for you, take a look at SiteMapBuilder.net.
If you found this page useful, consider linking to it.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your web site (Ctrl+C to copy)
It will look like this: Sitemap Spider Food
The Web Optimist
Yes this is a nice feature, but I would still use Google Webmaster Console tools, because with this robots.txt option you don’t get feedback on if their are issues when the sitemap is parsed. You could have problems and not even know it!!