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From a hacker's perspective, the first order of business is going to be gathering information on the target. does a hacker or someone with malicious intent gain something in obtaining access to your sitemap? Yes, they do, and that is more information on the layout of your site. How common would there actually be something on the sitemap that could critically expose you to compromise on your VPS/Shared hosting? Um, probably super ultra rare. But yes there was one time that I was doing an audit for a company and the sitemap did point to a directory that was vulnerable to directory browsing. Fishing around in the directory, I was able to obtain a picture of a PayPal MasterCard front and back because some idiot snapped pictures of it and uploaded it onto the site. So there are benefits to hiding it, it's relatively easy to do, but if your lazy and don't want to, chances are your good.

Hi Thomas, I didn't tested this ever for my website but you can give this a try by mentioning in robots.txt file User-agent: bingbot Crawl-delay: 1 1 – Slow 5 – Very Slow 10 – Extremely Slow Thanks

Thanks to Donald's post, we could improve the value we get out of moz.com. As our keywords are phone numbers and the "best" numbers are changing a lot, we are now updating our keywords on a weekly basis. This gives us a much more relevant visibility value.

Yup, that makes sense to me. It's a bit of a grey area and an unusual case, but I think that this approach makes more sense - otherwise you're actively trying to stop people who aren't in the 'correct' country for a phone number to find/access that page.