Google xml sitemap - whether to do

Marketing
1

With a site recently upgraded, quite a few new pages need indexing. Will a sitemap help get them indexed sooner? Show edits to the pages quicker? (like dated comments)

can the .htaccess be included in a Sitemap?

Trying to determine if it is worth the time and effort. There are hundreds of files and images but they do have to be indexed soon.

Any decent auto generating tools to do this (compatible with Yahoo/Msn)?

2

A sitemap can help in getting pages indexed, but it is no guarantee that they will. The sitemap helps the search engines know about the pages rather than having to find them through their normal crawl process.

Do not include the .htaccess file in the sitemap.

Google recently released a new option to hopefully get pages crawled quicker, but there is a limit to how many you can submit weekly and/or monthly.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Submit URLs to Google with Fetch as Googlebot

3

Google recently released a new option
That’s funny, my Diagnostics page has no such Fetch option.

Perhaps its because a site listed has not been verified, but doing both: adding their meta snippet for verification, and uploading their download file, neither worked. Maybe due to the private registration, don’t know. This isn’t exactly easy.

4

Generating & submitting the sitemap for your site will help you index all the web pages of a site. There are many free tools available to generate the sitemaps.

5

Now that am finally about ready to do the xml site map, would really appreciate feedback on http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html if anyone has experience with this standalone generator. - Do not prefer an online tool, where who knows what could be run on the site.

I see it does link-checking, which I need anyway, but what I’m looking for, is insight for someone who has used it, beyond the website statement; partly because there is apparantly no refund after purchase, partly because I have never done business with them, and partly because of present, limited user-variables. And yes, I do see the free trial.

  • any particular glitches with FTP clients/possibly with CoreFTP lite?
  • generate dependable code?
  • really able to exclude pages preferentially?
    (little unclear on this, where sites may have ssl protected folders - are entire folders potentially excluded?)
  • automatically exclude htaccess?
  • does it actually generate “news” and “video”: the way Google likes?
  • any unwanted junk being run via the software once it is installed in the root of the site?