Bing announced the launch of a public beta program for the Bing Sitemap Plugin, an open source server-side offering, which generates XML Sitemaps (compliant with sitemaps.org) for sites running on IIS and Apache.

The plugin can generate both comprehensive sitemaps of all URLs seen in server traffic and sitemaps dedicated to store URLs that have changed recently.

“Having both comprehensive and delta Sitemaps provides you with significant benefits, as you will always have a full, up-to-date list of all URLs on your website that search engines can use for deep crawl, as well as a concise Sitemap of URLs that were modified recently, which search engine crawlers can prioritize,” says Bing’s Duane Forrester. “This can help in keeping bot traffic bandwidth down. In addition, the Sitemap Plugin automatically adds <lastmod> values to your Sitemap, and generates <priority> values to the Sitemap based on how popular your URLs are.”

“SEO is a complex and ever changing area but there are some key elements that are still as relevant now as they were a few years ago,” he says. “One of them is building high-quality XML Sitemaps, a comprehensive and accurate representation of your website. That way, you keep control of what you want search engines to index in order of priority and you inform them of new or updated content on your website.”

More on the plugin here. It can be downloaded here.