How ro write a robots txt file to point to your site map

[Nightwing]

Good afternoon from still wet & humid wetherby UK...

I want to write a robots text file that instruct the bots to index everything and give a specific location to the sitemap. The sitemap url is:http://business.leedscityregion.gov.uk/CMSPages/GoogleSiteMap.aspx

Is this correct:

User-agent: *
Disallow:
SITEMAP: http://business.leedscityregion.gov.uk/CMSPages/GoogleSiteMap.aspx

Any insight welcome

[RyanKent]

Yes, your example is correct.

A great page for learning about robots.txt is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Sitemap

I will share the official method of declaring your sitemap location involves only the first letter being capitalized (i.e. Sitemap not SITEMAP) but I am almost certain it does not make a difference.

A few other suggestions which are best practices but do not have to be followed:

• use all lowercase letters in URLs

• name the sitemap file "sitemap" not "GoogleSiteMap"

• submit XML sitemaps when possible. I am again almost certain Google can read other versions so if all you care about is Google then it's fine but otherwise I would suggest just using xml files.

example: business.leedscityregion.gov.uk/cmspages/sitemap.xml

Some other helpful links:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183668

http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

[Matthew_Edgar]

Ryan's answer is correct. I just wanted to jump in to say that I know from first hand experience that Google and Bing are both able to read the sitemap file even if it is a different extension and even if you can't name it sitemap.xml.

[Nightwing]

Thank you so much for all your replies
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