As a website owner, you know how hard it is to find a good niche and mine it for gold. It takes a LOT of research and even more tweaking to get it all just right, so why would you hand that all over to your competition? That’s exactly what you’re doing when you save your sitemap with a filename like sitemap.xml or xmlsitemap.xml.
You DO NOT have to use the name the xml sitemap program suggests and in fact should be as careful about your naming convention as you would your password. Google does not care how you name your sitemap file, so be creative and so get creative and protect your niche with a filename that’s hard or impossible to guess!
Take this excerpt from a sitemap.xml file:
(url)
(loc)somesite(/loc)
(priority)1.0(/priority)
(loc)somesite/giant-fish.php(/loc)
(priority)0.9(/priority)
(loc)somesite/fishing-report.php(/loc)
(priority)0.9(/priority)
(loc)somesite/fishing-gear.php(/loc)
(priority)0.5(/priority)
(loc)somesite/fishing-rods.php(/loc)
(priority)0.2(/priority)
(loc)somesite/glow-spoons.php(/loc)
(priority)0.2(/priority)
If I were to visit my competitors site/sitemap.xml I would see a complete listing of what is considered high priority, in this case it would be the terms giant fish and fishing report. Although this is an example, a real site would show a ton of hot terms considered important by the webmaster.
Besides keeping the name of your sitemap xml file private, you also need to consider the service you’re using. There are a number of programs out there that may keep a copy of your hot terms for later use. For example, a plugin / extension / module or online sitemap program could analyze the sitemap url, determine if the website itself is popular, then record all the terms with a priority greater than 0.8 and store it for later use.
Tip: want to see if a program you are running on your PC is communicating with a website? Use TCPView By Mark Russinovich at Windows Sysinternals (Microsoft). The only site it should be communicating with is the website you’re building a XML sitemap for! This works for programs that run on your computer, such as ones you have downloaded or java based applications. Sitemap plugins, modules and extensions can’t be monitored this way.
Moral of the story: Use a unique name for your xml file and make sure your sitemap program is not recording and reporting your top terms or you may find a new competitor on your heels!