Question

Is there a method where you can only allow robots such as Google, Yahoo, or other search engine robots to my sitemap which is located at http://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml. Is this possible to not allow direct access by a user but only to robots?

Answer 1

Well basically no, but you could do something with the user-agent string and disallow access (assuming Apache)

<Location /sitemap.xml>
  SetEnvIf User-Agent GodBot GoAway=1
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
  Deny from env=!GoAway
</Location>

But as it says here (where I found the syntax)

Warning:

Access control by User-Agent is an
unreliable technique, since the
User-Agent header can be set to
anything at all, at the whim of the
end user.