Newbie question: If web content on a site is being constantly updated and added, does that mean that a new sitemap will have to be resubmitted also? Can you submit multiple sitemaps for one website? Any advice will be appreciated. Traume Webmaster (for lack of a better word) AdHotShot.com
For maximum benefit, your sitemap should be updated along with your site. In practice, many people either automate the updating or do it, say, once a week or month. The ideal update frequency would depend on how often you add/change content on your site.
What if your content constantly changes, but your sitemap would never change? I have new content scrolling through my site every 5 minutes, but google never crawls my site.
If your website is "constantly updated", such as a forums. Then setup your sitemap on a cron job. That is what I do for it to update once a day.
Within webmaster tools you add a site map. Now it's got a column that says "last downloaded", do you have to resubmit each sitemap or does google automatically re-crawl your sitemap to see if it's changed. I say this because my sitemap dynamically updates with my sites content. If it doesn't update automatically then I guess I have to ping it, but don't want to do that if Google's already re-looking at the sitemap every day.
You don't need to do that because google bot will re-visited to your site later then it will show "new last downloaded" for that new dated. So that if you really want google bot updted you site data maybe you should ping because you cannot control gogole bot to visite to your site in anytime you want.