Hello,

I'm interested in using sitemaps for my website. However I am concerned that it might make it be very easy for someone to steal content. I was wondering if it could be possible to build a secret url locating my sitemap. The secret url would then be submitted to the search engines. So the sitemap would be accessible only if one knows the url. I am concerned though that say Google might also document this url and that a simple search could then reveal it. Thank you to let me know what you guys are doing?

Thank you so much,

Alex

You can choose to name your sitemap.xml what every you would like. If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account and an existing sitemap.xml just be sure to change the URL there.

You might also check out:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Sitemap/topics

Hi,

Thanks for your reponse. So using this method I should not be worried about possible content theft because the site map url is not easily guessable. The search engine that will use this site map will have over 500 000 urls.

Thank you,

Alex

Yes and if you select to verify via blank html method, there would be no easy way of knowing you even have a sitemap.

Why would one want the sitemap to be secret except for search engines? Everyone can then find all indexed pages eg: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fblogoscoped.com

Mike:
The sitemap is easier to parse. To get the indexed pages from Google, you need to scrape the search results and you can only obtain up to 1000 results.