Search Engines Crawling Question

Question

the main page of my site is /home.php This page has pagination with anchor tags that link to many other queries of the same page, for example

• /home.php?start=4
• /home.php?start=8

and so on...

My question is, when i include the home.php page in a sitemap will crawlers crawl what ever page home.php links to(ex. /home.php?star=4)? or do i have to include each and every page on a sitemap?

Answer 1

Crawlers typically will follow all normal links from the pages they find in your sitemap, but they may do so at a frequency &c which may not suit your purposes -- a complete sitemap gives you much more control (e.g. avoid wasting bandwidth by having unchanged pages re-crawled frequently, and so forth) and so it's much more advisable. It shouldn't be hard for you to generate the sitemap automatically, after all.