Sitemap help

[Adam Smith]

Hi all.

I want to create a sitemap for my wordpress website.

I dont want to use a plugin for this because I am creating pages that do not exsit.. its a little compliated, but the pages are created on the fly with a dynamic page and change each time they are loaded - therefore a standard plugin will not work.

Can I just create a txt file called robots.txt and upload it and in the file put all the pages on a seperate line i.e

www.domain.com/page1
www.domain.com/page2

???

[BackLinkiT]

Robots.txt is completely different. Ignore that!

You need a mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Use Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps Generator

You can then edit the file in notepad to add or remove url's as you wish. Just follow the format.

I hope that helps.

Peter

[didyouknow]

?? you are mixing up 2 different things. Robots.txt is NOT a sitemap! be very careful with robots.txt, better not change/use it if you don't know what you are doing.

As for the sitemap, it just needs to be in an xml format and yes you can do it by hand, but wouldnt recommend it.
You should use the script that is creating the pages to also add those pages to your sitemap. Shouldn't be to hard..

[ghazia]

Robots.txt is entirely different from sitemap. You can just include the url of the sitemap in Robots.txt file. Having a robots.txt file in not mandatory.

[antony05]

robots.txt in very important to business or company sites, you can use this file to restrict search engines to index your confidential part of you website.

[Adam Smith]

Ahhh sorry guys, I wrote this post quite early and obviously wasnt thinking straight.

I ment sitemap.

Would it be ok to just create my own sitemap in a txt editor and save it with a .xml extension.

In the sitemap would be

www.domain.com/page1
www.domain.com/page2

and then just uploaded that to my domain i.e www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

and then submit this to webmaster tools.

I did hear that I had to write it like this:

<loc>http://www.domain.com/page1</loc>

Which one is correct?

Also, do I need to include:

<lastmod>
<changefreq>
<priority>

and will it affect the SEO of the pages if I leave them out?

Also one more thing.... do I need to start my sitemap with

<url>
and finish with
</url>

??

[BackLinkiT]

Originally Posted by BackLinkiT

Use Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps Generator

Follow the format generated by this and you will not go wrong.

I include:

<changefreq>
<priority>

But never bother with <lastmod>

Peter