SEO: Custom sitemap provider versus static web.sitemap file

Question

We are using a custom sitemap provider to populate an ASP.Net application's menu control from a recursive database table and therefore do not use the static xml web.sitemap file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<siteMap xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AspNet/SiteMap-File-1.0" >
    <siteMapNode url="" title=""  description="">
        <siteMapNode url="" title=""  description="" />
        <siteMapNode url="" title=""  description="" />
    </siteMapNode>
</siteMap>

For SEO optimization reasons would it be useful to export the customsitemap provider's items into the web.sitemap file even though the app doesn't even use the web.sitemap file?

If it does impact positively on SEO, what approach to use to get the sitemapprovider items into the xml file in the correct format?

How would you go about doing that?

Answer 1

I'm not sure anything particularly cares about asp.net's sitemap beyond asp.net itself. As far as converting into the infinitely more SEO happy (Google) Sitemap schema - this is the kind of job XSLT is designed for.

Answer 2

I'll second annakata there. Google is not going to care about your asp.net sitemap file. You'll need to create one that conforms to the sitemap spec. XSLT would be a great solution for creating that from your existing sitemap.

Also, keep in mind that if you have lots of links (over 50,000 URLs or more than a 10MB sitemap) you'll need to use a special sitemap index with multiple sitemaps.

To make sure your sitemap is found by search engines, put a reference to it in your robots.txt file as well:

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

You can also use Google's webmaster tools to let them know about your sitemap. This will generally help your site get indexed more quickly, and also provides lots of great info about your site (broken sitemap links, pagerank stats, etc). Yahoo has a similar tool called site explorer as well.

Answer 3

You've created just what I am looking for -- a databased sitemap provider to be used to create breadcrumb menu. Could share how you did that? and how you are implementing it?