Hi all,
Hope some of your experts can offer a novice a little guidance.
The sitemap generator is great, and I have now created xml sitemaps for 3 of my 6 domains and submitted them via the advised links to both Google and Yahoo. Can anyone suggest how I submit to other search engines such as Ask and MSN? Is it merely a case of going to their submit a site page and entering the sitemap url in the hope that all of the other pages will then get crawled?
Should this also be the rule when submitting to any search engine; when asked for the home, main or index page, enter the sitemap url instead?
Thanks in advance of any suggestions.
John C
www.faux-fur-throws.com
Excellent question John and welcome to the forum!
When you notify a search engine of your site, you’ll want to give them your main page and not the location of the sitemap file.
To notify search engines including and not limited to, Google and Yahoo, such as MSN and ASK, simply enter the location of the sitemap in your robots.txt file.
You can tell all the search engines about your sitemap file by adding this line to your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: [location]
So, if your sitemap is located at xmlsitemap.org/sitemap.xml, then you’ll enter the following the into the robots.txt file:
Sitemap: xmlsitemap.org/sitemap.xml
Here is an example of xmlsitemaps robots.txt file.
This new value for the robots.txt file is a joint effort by many to provide a universal solution to sitemap discovery.
Best regards,
Jim.