partial google sitemaps

[Jeff]

I'm thinking of adding a google sitemap for my forums to start -- but if I generate a google sitemap for my /forums/ directory will this hurt or reduce google's crawling of other parts (subdirectories) of my site for which I have not yet created a google sitemap?

[Andilinks]

I have wrestled with this question.

I decided that until I can give them a full and properly maintained xml sitemap (maybe never) I would provide a url list sitemap which is simply a complete list in a file called mydomain.urls formatted thus:

http://www.mydomain.com/
http://www.mydomain.com/3dg.htm
http://www.mydomain.com/50cent.shtm
http://www.mydomain.com/abcom.htm
http://www.mydomain.com/abent.htm

...

I keep mine in alphabetical order for myself but that's not necessary for Google. Googlebot fetches it twice a day whether it is changed or not. I doubt I'll ever be competent enough to be sure that I have an xml version correct on an ongoing basis though I have at times given them both. The only issues I have with the way Google updates its index probably wouldn't be helped by a better sitemap.

I'd be interested to hear how others are handling this. Googlebot does seem to add my new pages and visit my site in a timely manner.

[Jeff]

Well I'm giving this mod a go:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=100435

In theory it should really add efficiency to the crawling of my forums. I just hope that I don't hurt the indexing of the rest of my site as I too will not have time for a while to manually create and update sitemaps for the non-forum portions of my site.