lemme see if i got this straight. as far as i can tell, there are three ways to inform big G about my sitemap. 1. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=SITEMAPURL 2. log in to webmaster tools, then click on add sitemap, choose type, enter. 3. add it to robots.txt am i right in assuming that with (1) you can add a variety of different sitemaps in different locations in your site, whereas with (2) you can only add the one in the highest level directly? because that is specifically what it says "this is the highest level directory i have access to" or something like that. using the robots.txt file, again, it would have to go to the highest level directory, would it not? appreciate any info. thanks.
Not sure what you mean by "highest directory". You can make and submit a "sitemap of sitemaps" (a sitemap that links to other sitemaps), so in effect submitting one is not an issue, and in fact is probably a better way of managing sites with several sitemaps.
highest level directory means root directory. yeah, with sitemap i actually meant sitemap index. have a very large site with about 300,000 pages. so i would not want to put any sitemaps in the root directory, it's just too much of a pain to manage. but that is the only option google gives you when you login at webmaster tools. anyone know where google provide the ping URL? couldn't find it on their pages. i found the ping URL here at digitalpoint, no idea where it came from originally. searching for http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= didn't help.
I assume all those pages come out of a database, so couldn't you just have the sitemap index generated automatically from there ?
theoretically yes. but practically, because of various technical issues, i thought it would be easier to manage small sets of sitemaps, in directories here and there, and not for the whole site. i guess i'm the only one with this problem. anyway, i now have a sitemap index at root.