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Challenger

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Pre-Sitemap Set-Up Questions
« on: June 23, 2009, 07:05:23 PM »
Hi,

I will be hopefully launching a new site within a month or so. Un-chartered waters for me I might add!

My questions are as follows (sorry if they are a bit dumb to those who know better);

Can I have both an xml sitemap for SE robots and a html sitemap for users?  If this is possible and say I want to exclude certain pages on my website from my xml map, say for example printer friendly page versions or just maybe terms and conditions or privacy policy pages, can I exclude these page urls from my xml sitemap but include them in the html version?  If this is possible would I then have to put a "<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">" into the page headers of the pages I dont want crawled given that the search engines will pick up on them anyway?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can help clarify.   :)
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XML-Sitemaps Support

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Re: Pre-Sitemap Set-Up Questions
« Reply #1 on: June 23, 2009, 09:49:48 PM »
Hello,

yes, that's correct:
1. it is recommended to have both XML and HTML sitemaps (one for search engines) and one for visitors.
2. you can use meta robots tag in <head> section of your pages to exclude them from indexing. You can use robots.txt file for the same purposes, like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /print.php

(just an example, if your printer friendly pages are served by "print.php" script)
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Challenger

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Re: Pre-Sitemap Set-Up Questions
« Reply #2 on: June 24, 2009, 10:14:24 AM »
Thanks Admin,

It's really great to get definitive concise replies for someone like myself who is trying to learn the ropes.

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XML-Sitemaps Support

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Re: Pre-Sitemap Set-Up Questions
« Reply #3 on: June 24, 2009, 10:58:17 PM »
Glad to help! :)
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