Site map questions

[mr_chill]

I have a website hosted on godaddy and there is a feature that builds sitemaps in xml for google but I don't know what to give them. If I let it go I end up with a couple thousand urls and I wonder if I need to submit all of that or can I just create a site map with my core site and leave out the thousands of misc. pages? Does anyone know of a sitemap tutorial that is easy to understand for the novice but comprehensive enough to have SEO value?

[Marshall]

hi mr_chill and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

The best place to start is by checking [sitemaps.org...]

Site maps (or "sitemaps if you prefer) are primarily meant to assist SE's in finding pages they may not otherwise find. SE's will spider down your site, but if your site contains a lot of sub-directories, e.g.: www.example.com/directory1/directory2/example.htm, site maps will expedite the spidering of these pages.

If your site has good navigation, I suggest only placing key pages in the site map such as those in the root directory and the first level down, but that is merely my opinion. If, however, there are pages you do not want spidered, I suggest a robots.txt file to disallow those pages. That being said, do not put a URL in the site map that you subsequently disallow in the robots.txt unless the disallow is for a specific spider.

And there are sites that will generate site maps for you, some of which allow you to set parameters. Otherwise, once the map is generated, you can edit it as needed.

Marshall