Are there any disadvantages of switching from xml sitemaps to .asp sitemaps in GWT
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I have been using multiple xml sitemaps for products for over 6 months and they are indexing well with GMT.
I have been having this manually amended when a product becomes obsolete or we no longer stock it.
I now have the option to automate the sitemaps from a SQL feed but using .asp sitemaps that I would submit the same way in GWT.
I'd like your thoughts on the Pro's and cons of this, pluses for me is realtime updates, con's I percieve GMT to prefer xml files.
what do you think?
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Automation of this has been problomatic because of the way our CMS paginates URL's, It was sending xml generators crazy.
looks like I am still going to have to have some involvement with this on an ongoing basis.
Thanks for mentioning BING..
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Sitemaps are a relatively simple process and there are many tools which offer the ability to automate XML sitemaps. Why do you feel limited to using asp for automation?
I am 99% sure Google would work with any format of sitemap just fine. They worked to create the sitemap.org standard with Bing and Yahoo, which is an XML standard. Even if Google accepted your ASP sitemap I am not sure Bing would, so I would recommend XML.
I was surprised to not find any solid confirmation that Google accepts ASP sitemaps. The closest I could find is they accept sitemaps in "many formats" but recommend XML: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183668&ctx=cb&src=cb&cbid=-1e1qm3yl3gxen&cbrank=1
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