Sitemap Indexing

must we submit to google, bing etc?

[gwnhwyvar]

I'm wondering, if/when you create and upload a sitemap.xml file to your site, must you submit it to Google/bing etc. to have it indexed? I mean, won't it get indexed by being uploaded and added to your .htaccess file? Or is it still better to submit them? Tx.

[anallawalla]

You can certainly point to the sitemap.xml file from robots.txt (not .htaccess) and let a SE spider find it some day. But using the WMT interface to submit it gives you additional information that makes it worthwhile to do so.

[gwnhwyvar]

I'm sorry, I meant robots file - I always get those mixed up! But thanks for the reply!