Recently Google, Microsoft and Yahoo got united to support sitemaps. And now, the three joined by Ask.com are supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file if the location of your sitemaps is listed in a robots.txt file.
In the past, if you created a sitemap, you then had to manually submit it to the search engines. With this announcement, search engines will check your robots.txt file for a link to a sitemaps file, then get the file from that location. This is a big plus because all the major search engines regularly check robots.txt files as part of their ordinary crawling.
To add the sitemap location, just put a line like this anywhere in your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE
Replace the LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE with the actual location. For example, if www.oliveglobal.co.uk has a sitemap file called sitemap.xml in top level, the reference would be like this:
Sitemap: http://www.oliveglobal.co.uk/sitemap.xml
But waht to do if you have more than one sitemaps file? Ideally, you'd create a special "sitemaps index" file that links to all of them, then put a link to the sitemaps index file in your robots.txt file. If that sounds like too much work, you can have more than one sitemaps URL listed in the robots.txt file.
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