By Ken Leonard
When you summit an XML Sitemap through your Google Webmaster Tools account it only goes to Google. Attracta uses a different method to submit your Sitemap, allowing Google and all the other search engines to use it.
Attracta creates your XML Sitemap and hosts it on their servers. Then they add a reference to it in your robots.txt file and "ping" Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask with an "HTTP request", telling them you have a new or updated Sitemap. The search engines respond by downloading your Sitemap from Attracta (this is how Attracta knows they read it) and visiting your site to see if your robots.txt file contains a reference to the same Sitemap. (This is to authenticate that the Sitemap belongs to your site.) The search engines then use the Sitemap to find all the pages of your site.
The advantage of the Attracta method is that it not only submits your Sitemap directly to the top four search engines, other smaller search engines can also use it. All search engines read your robots.txt file when they visit your site, and will use your XML Sitemap if it is referenced there.
Having more than one Sitemap is not a problem either. Google will use both the one in your Webmaster account and the one in your robots.txt file.
Below is the reference to this type of Sitemap submission from the Google Webmaster Tools help section:
( http://www.google.com/support/webmast… )
"Resubmitting a Sitemap by sending Google an HTTP request
If you do this, you don’t need to resubmit it using Webmaster Tools. The Submitted column will continue to show the last time you manually clicked the link, but the Last Downloaded column will be updated to show the last time our system fetched your Sitemap."
