Will using .htaccess prevent a good sitemap

How about it? No one seems to know this answer.

1. Site will have a ton of articles, dynamically created via .htaccess.
2. Site has an XML sitemap to G and Y.

Will the articles populate inside of the sitemap, or will they remain invisible, and such invisible to G & Y?

 

Don't understand the question.

 

Sorry, let me explain.

Someone told me, and I'm trying to paraphrase, that with .htaccess, a page will not physically exist on a webpage. The page gets dynamically create by .htaccess support.

As such, search enginer spiders treat it as a normal static page.

If you use .htaccess, you can easily save a lot of web space and also rank could possibly improve on search engines.

If this is true, and I run a sitemap on the page, will the pages get picked up in the map?

 

It depends on how you create the sitemap. The best thing is to just use php and your database to create the sitemap yourself, that way you can make sure it lists the pages you want it to list.

 

Thanks Mad4.

I am currently using this site map from these guys, paid version, all hosted on my site http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ It has worked well.

But I'll be bringing in a lot of content, 300-500 new pages, and I want to make sure they get picked up in the sitemap.

Is .htaccess the way to go, .HTML, or is there another work around?

 

Create the xml sitemap with php. Its a 5 minute coding job. Nothing to do with html or htaccess really.

 

.htaccess really only makes it look pretty by rewriting the URLs based on your regex. Google/Yahoo really shouldn't be able to determine whether you are creating pages dynamically using .htaccess or you physically created each page (while it could be assumed based on the formatting, no real way to tell to outside viewer)

 

MyBlueDog, ok I hope you don't mind me saying especially as I don't know your skill level, but it seems as though you've got a bit confused.
Firstly, no a .htaccess file will not prevent you from making a sitemap if it's coded correctly.

The .htaccess file does not dynamically create your pages. It's the script (php pages) that create your web pages dynamically from your database. These dynamically created web pages often don't have a very search engine friendly format. eg they could be something like:
mydomain.com/index.php?=43c=ab2

As kohashi said the .htaccess file can therefore be used to rewrite the urls to be more search engine friendly. eg:
mydomain.com/yellow-widgets.php

Once you've got your .htaccess set up correctly you can then create your sitemap. Your site map would list your se friendly urls.

 

Thanks Saxon. I understand now.

I got confused because someone told me the site pages .php were actually dynamic... and I was told the .php page really don't "exist" or "reside" on my server anywhere.

That confused me as I thought that if this was indeed the case, how would the XML tool (described above) I use to manually crawl my site actaully populate the sitemap?

I was thinking the sitemap tool wouldn't see anything! Doesn't sound like that is the case from what you are saying. (Somehow, sitemap sees all the .php pages, regardless of whether they are created by .htaccess...?)