How often to update a site map ?? and are 2 different sitemaps needed??

im just very new to sitemaps and im wondering how often it should be updated ? and do we have to create 2 different site maps, meaning are 2 separate site maps needed for Google and Yahoo ?

 

If your site is frequently crawled then sitemaps really don't matter. The google bot and yahoo slurp can find your pages, don't worry about it. Focus on giving them the content they want so they keep coming back.

 

yes.. if you update your site and add any page then you have to update your sitemap..

 

when you create a new page, add it in your existing sitemap. then resubmit to webmaster tools.

 

I use multiple sitemaps

 

An XML sitemap is for Google only and you submit this through webmaster tools.

An HTML sitemap is for your users.

I only have an XML ma and it automatically updates everytime I publish something (wordpress powered)

 

Only update if you add or remove a page. Only 1 sitemap!

 

The best approach is to firstly, have one sitemap. Google and the other engines still use sitemaps and encourage users to create them so we should take notice of that.

What I would say is that if you have a larger site, then create multiple sitemaps for different areas. For example if you have an ecommerce site and have different categories, then create a sitemap for the different categories. Or if you have your site in different languages, the same applies.

The benefit of this is that you can check via webmaster tools periodically and get a good idea of which areas of your site are being crawled and indexed well compared to areas of the site which are not. If you find sections of the site which have few urls indexed, that should tell you to do more internal and external linking to the different parts of the site in order to improve crawl depth.

Hope this helps.