I am trying to figure out if it would be better to automate my sitemap or to manually update it monthly.
I am not very good with how sitemaps work in the first place so trying to learn about them now is something that I am really interested in doing. Would automating the sitemap make a large difference in the indexing process? Does the sitemap have anything to do with the indexing process in the first place?
Also could I go about using a system similar to this in my sitemap and have it extremely limited in the sitemap but would still crawl all of the links on that page?
<url>
<loc>http://www.somedomain.com/category/</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.80</priority>
</url>
Or would I need to make it so that the entire sitemap has each post like this
<url>
<loc>http://www.soundpiff.com/category/example-content.html</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.80</priority>
</url>