Hi, I encountered a problem. our sitemap submitted to google, to let google grab it, my sitemap xml is public, anyone who know our sitemap url can download my sitemap file, and grab all the businesses urls in the sitemap files. it's bad for us. we want to protect our content. so I want a solution to let google access our sitemap file only, and don't want anyone else can access it. what's the best practices? any help is appreciated. Thanks
Read this http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/59849/how-to-hide-my-xml-sitemap-from-competitors-but-not-from-search-engines
Uhm... Anyone can download anything on your public facing webpage regardless of a sitemap, as long as they know what they're doing. You're not protecting anything by hiding the sitemap - if you want to protect content, you need some sort of login or temporary download urls or similar.
You're damn correct. The fact is that anybody with a good web development IQ can download pretty much anything on your site secured or not. So my suggestion is you give some measure of protection to your valued content. You can't expect full security in the online world. No.
Hiding a sitemap will almost always give zero benefit. If a competitor wants to analyze your internal pages, they will use some website checker / crawler software (e.g. A1 Website Analyzer - but there are more tools out there) and let it run till done, so they can find all pages and get an analysis of them. They do not need sitemap files for that.