How does one keep a sitemap up to date when new pages are created everyday and when other pages can change? Is it necessary to generate a new sitemap everyday, or how does it work?
It is probably the most surefire / best way. However, if you are usng e.g. Wordpress or some CMS that always knows (from a DB) what pages exist, you may be able to find a specific script for that.
General speaking,yes! But some CMS's like Wordpress has a plugin that it will generate a new one automatically.
i ve wrote a script that exactly does that now im @ net-cafe(escaped from school ) when i arrive home , i ll pm you cheers
My suggestion is not. If you have a lot backlinks, you don't need a sitemap file. Google can crawl dynamic urls generated by php, no need to spend a lot of time on sitemap to instruct it to crawl the newly updated urls.
Why do you think so ? I have many pages not spidered yet. Google created that sitemap feature for some reason.
I also disagree with this advice, especially when most modern CMS apps (like my Drupal) can create XML site maps automatically. The XML sitemap, done right, gets new pages crawled quickly, highlights old pages with revisions, and leaves old pages "as is". Getting new and revised pages crawled is obviously a win, but saving bandwidth by not crawling old pages also helps. Given the adoption by Google, Yahoo!, and others of this tool, I see little/no downside and much upside. Even if you have to create a new one manually once a week, go for it
i agree, an updated sitemap is important.. it will help point the G-Spider to the new stuff, and not waste time on old, unchanged stuff. I use Drupal which as a module for generating a dynamic, always-up-to-date sitemap. I think this is one of the things that helped contribute to my site's success..