Sitemap utility -what is a good one to use??

[Lucas]

- if a page is not in the sitemap of the site, does it get indexed by SE?
- Some utilities, will only do a certain amount of pages, can i do multiple sitemaps or branches of the tree?

mjh5598 [SEO Forum]

[Hunter]

A sitemaps helps to make sure all your pages get indexed, but that's it; it helps; it's not strictly necessary; as long a page has links the SE's can find it, if they do find it and put it in the index depends on the amount of links; so, having them in the sitemap is rather important, but not strictly necessary.
about the utilities; yes, the free ones have a limit; this one max 500 pages;
xml-sitemaps.com

you could do it section by section or ... pay for it ...

[Connor]

Getting your sitemap indexed by Google et al insures that they at least know about your pages, and then its up to the respective algos to decide when and how deep they spider. If you put a link in your robots.txt file like this:

Sitemap: theseoshop.com/sitemap.xml or whatever is appropriate for your site the Spiders will see it almost every time they visit your site.

Pages may get indexed if the search engines find links to them from anywhere, but sitemaps are surer and a lot easier.

If you have less than 500 pages in your site xml-sitemaps.com is a good free one, if you have more than that many pages you can download and run JG softs GSiteCrawler free which will make xml, gz files and will create urllist files for Yahoo plus ROR files, html sitemaps etc.

Another alternative is to create a series of smaller sitemaps sitemaps.org/protocol.php has this to say about how to use multiple files:

You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). If you would like, you may compress your Sitemap files using gzip to stay within 10MB and reduce your bandwidth requirement. If you want to list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemap files.

If you do provide multiple Sitemaps, you should then list each Sitemap file in a Sitemap index file. Sitemap index files may not list more than 1,000 Sitemaps and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). The XML format of a Sitemap index file is very similar to the XML format of a Sitemap file.

The Sitemap index file must:

* Begin with an opening <sitemapindex> tag and end with a closing </sitemapindex> tag.
* Include a <sitemap> entry for each Sitemap as a parent XML tag.
* Include a <loc> child entry for each <sitemap> parent tag.

The optional <lastmod> tag is also available for Sitemap index files.

Note: A Sitemap index file can only specify Sitemaps that are found on the same site as the Sitemap index file. For example, yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml can include Sitemaps on yoursite.com but not on example.com or yourhost.yoursite.com. As with Sitemaps, your Sitemap index file must be UTF-8 encoded.