Are you a SEO-conscioncious webmaster? Of course, you are!

And you allready have a nice, standards-compliant XML sitemap! Congrats! You even had submitted it to the Google! Great! And you think you can enjoy from now that well-deserved pina colada, right? Hold on, you have some important tasks to do!

Very recently the major searchengines agreed to extend the robots.txt's functionality. Until recently this little txt file in your root has served mostly to deny the searchengine robots to index files which aren't their business. And the file is up there in any recent Joomla install, and not withouth purpose, just remember the story when lot of Joomla webmasters where discovered their site backups, complete with admin passwords and other sensitive data readily indexed and publicized by Google. (Just not blame Google that don't index your site fully )

So, since mid May many SEO sites had reported, that all major webrobots are looking in the robots.txt file for the command:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

And if you have such a command, (and a valid XML file at the given URL), this will be processed. The advantage is obvious: this will allow your sitemap to be picked up by several search engines
automatically. Nobody is sure how long this feature has been around, but it's a welcome thing, and you should use it on your favor!

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