Hello. I have a question about sitemaps and wordpress. I know that the best way to create a sitemap is by using the Google XML Sitemap generator plugin. I do use this for my wordpress blogs, however i want to add an additional sitemap to my blog. My questions are this: 1) Do I just create an XML sitemap and upload it to my root directory? 2) On a regular static HTML page, it is useful to link to your sitemap to help google find it, however using the plugin in wordpress, there's no need to add a link to the sitemap since the plugin automatically pings google to inform it of it's location. If I dont want to ping google with my new sitemap, should I just link to it from my blog? 3) How do I know when/if google has found my sitemap? Thank you.
Better is to add it to your webmaster tools account, that way google spiders it pretty quick, say i have noticed it gets crawled in few hours if not earlier
do you mean the google webmaster toolkit i`ve heard the opposite, that doing this is in fact a bad idea and it takes even longer for it to get indexed. Not sure if thats true... but ive heard that quite a lot
1. Yes, you have to do that for sure 2. It is not needed 3. Don't bother with it. You just need to check whether Google has indexed you pages.