Jay Gaulard Blog

Sitemap Location in Robots.txt

August 21, 2007 – 9:31 am | by gaulardcom

Yesterday, I was updating my website sitemaps in Yahoo! Site Explorer and came across a post in their blog called, “Webmasters Can Now Auto-Discover With Sitemaps.”

This got me thinking, so I did a little more homework. Basically, this semi-new feature allows search engines to auto-discover website’s sitemaps. The syntax looks like this…

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

All you have to do is to add this line to your robots.txt file, or course, with your URL inserted instead of the example one above. This helps, because there are many search engines that now recognize Google sitemaps, but have no idea where yours is. Ask.com is a big one.

I found some resources and decided to list them here for you…

- Sitemap hint in robots.txt
- Sitemaps XML format
- What’s new with Sitemaps.org?
- Robots.txt Checker