Hi,

To begin with I am not a techie. But, because i wanted to create a sitemap i went through the sitemap generators. Found out that they are written in several different languages like C++, Perl, Python, etc. I also saw that these programs collate data from the directories in the server.
Now I have a whole lot of pages dyanmically generated on my site. They are not physically available on the server directories. Does this mean the sitemap generators are no good for me?

Thanks. Sam.

I haven't used a sitemap generator. Mind if I ask why you want to use one? As far as I know, and there's a new member who seems intelligent and says otherwise, you only need a sitemap if your site can't be crawled by a spider.

I would imagine most generators work by crawling your site, not the physical directory structure on the server machine. So the fact that they're dynamic and don't "exist" until you call them, won't be a problem. As long as they're linked to somehow.

I'm using GSiteCrawler. Our site has 36,000 mostly dynamically generated pages. It's a Windows program that queries your site the way a crawler would. You can then also set the priority/frequency values for each page pretty easily. Documenation is weak in places, but the application works and is free.

I've used the sitemap from xml-sitemaps.com ($20). It took an hour to setup and an hour to figure out and tell it what url's to give higher priority to. I was pretty happy with that program, but could have probably gotten away with using one of the free ones out there.

Went ahead and setup a nofollow scheme AND made a sitemap. Not sure if it really helps any to have a sitemap, but I figure it can't really hurt. I think google still does a discovery crawl even if you already give it a sitemap.

Thanks guys for all that info... in the meanwhile a tech guy at my workplace wrote and program and generated the whole thing. But, anyway information is always a delight. I checked out GSiteCrawler... it looks good. Thanks again.