Confused on how to use sitemapseo

Hi,

This is probably something simple, but I just want to understand how sitemapseo works.

I read some forum threads regarding sitemaps and found that running sitemapseo creates a sitemap. I ran this and found out that none of my products were in the sitemap. In reading the forum threads I found that I needed to turn on commonsettings.sitemapincludeproducts. I did this and now I have a sitemap of all 4000+ products.

Now for the questions...

1) did sitemapseo create a sitemap file?

2) I read some where on the 'net that I needed to include a link to the sitemap file in my robots.txt but I have not seen anything like that here in the forum. How does Google, Bing and the other search engines know where the sitemap is?

Could someone clear up the sitemap creation and how the search engines read my sitemap? I am hoping this is all automated some how and that I do not need to upload a sitemap file, unless that is the best way.

Thanks,
Rhek

rhek wrote:

I don't think it is automated unless google happens finds your sitemapseo page.  

I used google webmaster tools to submit my sitemapseo page.  Basically, all that you do is provide google with the link to your sitemapseo page, you do not need to upload the file manually.

i get errors when i try to submit my sitemap to google webmaster tools.

it asks for a url for your sitemap, you give it to'em and then they say:
Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.

so i'm tryin' to figure out how to mod this.

hemjesti wrote:
https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/13275/sitemap-submission.aspx
https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/13832/sitemap.aspx

that worked perfectly! thank you!

so, i typed in sitemapseo in the test sitemap google webmaster tools area and it took it. ten thumbs up for whoever figured that out!

Okay, That's good but what about submitting more than one site map for multilingual site.