Do we need to manually submit a sitemap every time, or can we host it on our site as /sitemap and Google will see & crawl it?

[askotzko]

I realized we don't have a sitemap in place, so we're going to get one built. Once we do, I'll submit it manually to Google via Webmaster tools.

However, we have a very dynamic site with content constantly being added. Will I need to keep manually re-submitting the sitemap to Google? Or could we have the continually updating sitemap live on our site at /sitemap and the crawlers will just pick it up from there? I noticed this is what SEOmoz does at http://www.seomoz.org/sitemap.

[AlanMosley]

Yes they will pick it up, you can put the address in your robots.txt file,

http://thatsit.com.au/robots.txt

then you dont need to submit it and all search engines will find it.

Keeep it up todate, free from 404's, 301's all urls should be status code 200, and keep it accurate. Bing for one will igniore it if it is not clean and acurate, they allow only a couple of percent error rate.

[askotzko]

Great, thanks!

Should we also have it live at /sitemap, as SEOmoz does?

[CaseyKluver]

Typically I use /sitemap.xml

I dont think it matters what you call it, as long as its submitted to Google webmaster tools.

Check out sitemaps.org for more info on how to create a quality sitemap

[rhutchings]

I think you may be getting xml sitemaps confused with sitemap pages.  Your xml sitemap should live at /sitemap.xml as Alan pointed out.   The seomoz and other sites that have a /sitemap page is for different purposes.  Its not your xml file, its a "topical guide" to your website and all the major sections of your site.

Remember that you can also create a xml sitemap index if you need to have different sitemaps (video, news, content) that houses all the different xml sitemaps underneath it.

[applesofgold]

There are also scripts you can purchase for very little cost and have them install it for you on your server and set up a cron job to have your sitemap run automatically each week and ping the search engines to find your sitemap.

One such service is at xml-sitemaps.com - they can install it for you and set up the cron job as well.

Just make sure you are on a good server that can handle the script if your website is large.

[askotzko]

Thanks, Ryan. I was confusing those.

To execute the sitemap index, would I just point the crawlers to the index? Do you have any links to overviews of how to set that up?