Schedule blog posts on sitemap?

Hi,

is it a good idea to include links of my scheduled blog posts into the sitemap.xml file?

I know it might bring some 404 errors for the time they are not yet available, but is it a big problem as by doing this I can save a lot of time of tedious updating my sitemap one after another post once it is published?

There is a <lastmod> to fill on each entry in the sitemap.xml file, will it tell the crawler to start indexing this page from that date?

Thanks

What blogging software are you using and what sitemap software?

To the best of my knowledge the sitemap plugin for WordPress actually updates the sitemap automatically as the scheduled posts are published.

The last thing you’d want is for a search engine to read the sitemap and then NOT be able to find the pages it lists as then the entire sitemap will appear to be out of date.

Well, I can schedule my blog posts through the CMS, and I edit my sitemap manually. Did not know there are some plugins for updating my sitemap automatically, do not really trust these things as they are not reliable. So will doing it manually and messing up with search engine hurt my site and SEO?

I have one question:

Why do you want to worry about adding a blog post link to your sitemap, when that link would obviously be placed on your domain.com/blog or blog.domain.com? whichever format you have employed.

Dear Timesheet, because I want to avoid situation where somebody copies my content and uses it somewhere else which could be indexed before the crawler comes to my website. Putting the link onto sitemap.xml and uploading the file to Web Master Tools guarantees very quick indexing by search engine.

[FONT=Verdana]Actually, it doesn’t. From http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184:

Google doesn’t guarantee that we’ll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site’s structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.

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Google actually indexes my newly posted pages next day, whereas if I leave it alone I must wait a few days up to a week. Anyone know how to speed up my indexing without touching the sitemap file?