How often should I update my sitemap?

[Mrupp44]

Assuming I add a new blog post every week how often should I submit a new sitemap?

What kind of tool would you suggest for creating a sitemap?

Where all should I submit my sitemap after I create it?

Thank in advance for your time and sharing your expertise! Have an awesome New Years!!

Matthew

[GregB123]

Hi Matthew. My understanding is that you should update the XML sitemap anytime you add a new page, and then go to GWT and re-submit that sitemap, so that Google quickly identifies you as the originator of that content.

This is supposed to be more important for things like a blog post that a scraper might harvest and quickly republish. One article I read by a popular blogger said he updated and re-submitted the sitemap, and used GWT to "Fetch as Google" the page immediately after publishing and BEFORE doing any publicity or RSS feed because otherwise his content was being scraped so fast.

I just manually update my own sitemaps (XML and HTML) using Notepad++ , but the originals were created by some free sitemap creator service.

I think the normal place to submit is through Google's and Bing's Webmaster Tools, but I would be interested to hear of other places...

Happy New Year to you too!

[FedeEinhorn]

Personally I re-create my sitemap automatically every day at a specific time. When a new post is published, it gets automatically shared on G+, twitter and Facebook, which somehow forces Google and others to crawl the page right away and get it indexed. You don't need to add the url to your sitemap immediately and then resubmit it, rather, you need to add it to the blog feed and have the feed as a sitemap in GWT and BWT, that should be it.

I use an automated software that works with any PHP enviroment xml-sitempas.com (paid version) that lets you chose several configurations and ways to create the sitemap, along with images, news, etc. Once the sitemap is re-created, it automatically pings Google and others to re-crawl it.

Hope that helps!

[Dubs]

Matthew,
You SHOULD have a new sitemap every time you generate new content.  Most CMS will make a new sitemap.  I've been working with the FISSION Content Management System creates an XML sitemap dynamically whenever posts or pages are created.  As long as the file name doesn't change, you should not have to submit to GWT and BWT regularly.