All, I have a sitemaps folder and I just want to password protect the sitemaps folder for others to leach and I need to add the sitemaps to google and bing. Is there a way to do it?
Couldn't tell you the exact code but you can add to your .htaccess file a deny to all bar Goggle and Bing Bot regarding the folder, should be able to search for the correct code syntax.
I want to password protect the sitemaps so that others cannot reach the files manually than the search engines alone.. How to do it?
I have no idea how to password protect but the above method would essentially do the same thing, only Bing & Google could access it.
Just a quick note: Preventing scrapers/crawlers from reading your sitemap.xml file will help little. Most crawlers will crawl websites without reading XML sitemap files. (But okay, it depends on what and why you are trying to protect. In some special cases, it may make sense to try limit access to your sitemap.xml to only Google/Bing search engine spider bot IP addresses.)
Why would you do so, i have seen some brands displaying blank page or redirecting to any other page when sitemap is accessed but not password prected