best/simplest way to inform search engine of sitemap location

Posted by Don on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by Don
Published on 2012-05-30T14:55:42Z Indexed on 2012/05/30 17:01 UTC
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seo

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search-engines

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sitemap

AFAIK, there are 2 ways to make search engines aware of a sitemap's location:

Include an absolute link to it in robots.txt

Submit it to them directly. The relevant URLs are:

    http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=SITEMAP_URL
    http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=SITEMAP_URL

Where SITEMAP_URL is the absolute URL of the sitemap. Currently, I do both. Regarding (2), I have a job that runs automatically every day which submits the sitemap to Bing and Google. I don't think there's any reason to do (1) and (2), but I'm paranoid, so I do.

I imagine you can avoid both (1) and (2) if you just make your sitemap accessible at a conventional URL (like robots.txt). What's the simplest and most reliable way to ensure that search engines can find your sitemap?

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