how to create google sitemap for mvc site?

Question

I used Mike Brind's Sitemap code, with a small change.

You need to add the XNamespace to every XElement, otherwise Google spits the dummy.

Here's my version:

public ContentResult Index()
        {
            XNamespace ns = "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9";
            const string url = "http://www.website.com/controller/action/{0}";
            var items = _db.DataAccessHere();
            var sitemap = new XDocument(
                new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", "yes"),
                new XElement(ns + "urlset",
                    from i in items
                    select
                    //Add ns to every element.
                    new XElement(ns + "url", 
                      new XElement(ns + "loc", string.Format(url, i.ItemID)),
                          new XElement(ns + "lastmod", String.Format("{0:yyyy-MM-dd}", i.DateAddedUTC)),
                      new XElement(ns + "changefreq", "monthly"),
                      new XElement(ns + "priority", "0.5")
                      )
                    )
                  );
            return Content(sitemap.ToString(), "text/xml");
        }

Credit to Mike for posting the original article and code.

Shameless self plug: I created a library called SimpleMvcSitemap after having weird issues with MvcSiteMapProvider on production. You can serve sitemap files from any action method without any configuration:

public class SitemapController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        List<SitemapNode> nodes = new List<SitemapNode>
        {
            new SitemapNode(Url.Action("Index","Home")),
            new SitemapNode(Url.Action("About","Home")),
            //other nodes
        };

        return new SitemapProvider().CreateSitemap(nodes);
    }
}

It also supports all the Google Sitemap extensions available.

The easiest way would be to use any one of a number of free sitemap builders out there - they will crawl your site, follow links, and generate a sitemap XML file for you.

Here's one for example

Here's a post that might give you some ideas. Basically it generates a sitemap from route values.