Search engine sitemap auto-discovery
written by Craig, 16 October 2007
XML sitemaps are very useful: they tell search engines which pages to index, how important each page is, and how often the content is updated. In my experience, sites usually get indexed much quicker and more effectively than standard URL submissions.
As you’d expect, Google was the first search engine to implement standard XML sitemaps. Yahoo and Ask now support the same format, and MSN are working on it.
Whilst this is great news for webmasters, it’s still necessary to manually submit your sitemap to each search engine. Or so I thought! It’s now possible to put a link to your sitemap in your site’s robots.txt file so any search engine can discover it, i.e.
Sitemap: http://www.site.com/sitemap.xml
This was only announced a few months ago, so I’d still recommend using the main Google, Yahoo, and Ask submission services.
CubeCart sitemap generator
If you’re running a CubeCart shop, we have produced a sitemap generation mod that creates search engine-compatible XML for every page and product. It takes around a minute to install, and automatically updates every time you change your catalogue. CubeCart v3 and v4 versions are available.