Point Google to Your Sitemap Via Robots.txt
The big four search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and Ask.com) recently united behind a standard called sitemaps “autodiscovery.” So instead of submitting your xml sitemap to every search engine individually, you can now add the following line to robots.txt and your sitemap will be picked up automatically:
Sitemap: http://mysite.com/sitemap.xml.
This is not to say to you should forgo tools such as Google’s Webmaster Central or Yahoo’s Site Explorer, but it’s a great first step to expose your site to the major search engines quickly.
On a side note, back when DNN 4.5 was first announced I promised a review of DNN’s ability to create an xml sitemap dynamically. Well, it turns out there is not much to review after all. All DNN 4.5.x does at this point is create a sitemap according to your site’s navigation scheme as stored in the Tabs database table without Admin and Host menu items. For my site that means that all blog entries are not included, which is exactly the kind of content I want to tell Google about. Here is my “hand-massaged” sitemap created with xml-sitemaps.com.
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