In our site, we have user's profile pages in a "members" directory.
Only logged-in user can access these urls.

Is it possible to add these urls in google's sitemap.xml?

Also, if we provide un-authenticated access to these pages, then those
url will be like

http://www.example.com/profile/user_1_profile
http://www.example.com/profile/user_2_profile
http://www.example.com/profile/user_3_profile

in the above case, how could we generate the sitemap.xml file, do we
need to add each of the above url in the xml file..? or is there any
other way to add these urls...!

friends, please re-direct me :-) to a better solution...!

thanks

Hi phpvjay and welcome to the groups!

It generally does not make sense to include URLs in sitemap files
which require authentication as neither the Googlebot nor the average
user would be able to access them. If, however, your profile pages are
freely accessible, they can be included in a sitemap file to help our
Googlebot learn about them. Keep in mind that these pages will still
need to be connected to the rest of your site with links as described
in our help page at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34397

There are many tools which you can use to generate a sitemap file for
your site. The choice of the tool depends on lots of things. If you
wish to tell the group a bit about your site, I'm sure the expert
users here can give you tips and recommendations that would be well
suited. Our sitemap generator can be found at
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html
and there is a list of third party products at http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

John

Hi,
Just to add that if a site considers changing
user profile pages from login-protected to
all-accessible, then maybe they should
let the users know, in case users wish to remove
details like email addresses before they appear
in search results.

Cristina.

On Sep 28, 7:21 pm, JohnMu wrote: