How to publish your xml sitemap

Wednesday, 14 August 2013

Once you have created your xml sitemap you will need to publish it to make search engines aware of its existence. This article provides an overview of how to publish your sitemap once you have created it.

There are a number of ways to do this but the quickest and easiest is to upload your sitemap to your website and set the robots.txt file.

The robots file is a set of instructions that tell search engine spiders how to process your website. You can create a reference in your robots file to tell search engines where to find your sitemap.

If you don't have a robots.txt file it is easy to create one using notepad adding the sitemap reference :

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

You can also submit your sitemap manually to a search engine and we highly recommend you do this and take advantage of Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster tools


Another way to notify search engines  is to "ping" them to tell search engines your the sitemaps existence and then again when you update it.You can do this using our Free RSS / Sitemap ping tool.

What are RSS Sitemaps?

Wednesday, 1 May 2013

RSS feeds are typically about informing search engines, directories and your users about new and updated content although they can also be used to detail all the pages in your website.

The good thing about RSS feeds is that you can list all your new and updated webpages and submit them to the search engines and directories to improve the inclusion of new content.


RSS feeds are essentialy XML data about the pages or information in your website e.g.

<channel>
<title>Website name</title>
<link>http://www.xmlwitemapgenerator.com</link>
<description>Website description here</description>

<item>
     <title>A Sitemap entry</title>
     <link>http://www.xmlwitemapgenerator.com/example</link>
     <description>Sitemap entry description</description>
</item>
<item>
     <title>Another item</title>
     <link>http://www.xmlwitemapgenerator.com/xml</link>
     <description>Another entry description</description>
</item>

</channel>

XmlSitemapGenerator.org allows webmasters to easily create RSS sitemaps for their website without the need to hand craft them, install software or write complicated scripts.

Support for RSS Sitemaps

Monday, 29 April 2013

You can now view and down load your XML Sitemaps in RSS format.




Index all file extensions by default

Friday, 26 April 2013

To make your life a little easier you can now index all file extensions by default.


New Advanced sitemap generator

Saturday, 23 March 2013

We are now piloting our new advanced xml sitemap generator!

Key features include :
  • Manage multiple websites each with their own configuration.
  • Spider 1000's of urls
  • Support for Xml and RSS sitemaps
  • Easily search and edit your sitemap mata data
  • Advanced filtering rules
  • Batch search and edit functions
  • Broken link error report
  • Batch editing of url and image entries
  • Hosted sitemaps
http://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/advanced/

The future of online sitemap generators....

Monday, 4 February 2013

A sneak peek at an advanced sitemap generator we are working on ....



Some fixes applied

Monday, 21 January 2013

Fix : Indexing websites with port number.

Our spider was not able to manage port numbers and this should now be fixed.
e.g. http://XmlSitemapGenerator.org:8080/demo

Fix : Some issues with indexing framesets and image maps.

We refined the way we process framesets and image maps as some html formats/ordering were not working for users.

Sitemap file limit increased and support for frames added.

Thursday, 10 January 2013

New : File limit increased from 100 to 250 (as a trial).

Quite a number of users were hitting the 100 file limit and our performance data suggetsed we had capacity to increase this so we have and will keep an eye on the situation to ensure it stays efficient.

New : Index iFrames and Frameset option.

We have added support for following urls embedded in iFrames and Framesets. This feature is enabled by default, so if you want to disable it click "more settings".

New : Default settings changed so it will spider all links and query strings by default.

We had quite a few people frustrated they had to keep selecting features and it seemed fairly obvious we should spider most urls by default so we made it so!  You can now switch stuff off using "more settings".

Fix : Some problems with checking querystring and file extensions.

Some patterns of dots and ampersands were causing some issues so we fixed this.

Sitemap email notification feature

Saturday, 5 January 2013

New : Email alert facility to let you know when your sitemap is ready.

Instead of sitting there waiting for your sitemap you can now enter your email address so that when your sitemap is ready, we will send you an email to let you know!

Fix : Error locating sitemap when spidering from a non root location.

Some users were using urls that were not the root of the domain e.g. xmlsitemapgenerator.org/illustration and this was sometimes tripping our spider up. 

Spider image-maps and more .....

Tuesday, 1 January 2013

New : Spider will now follow image-maps.

Our spider will now pick out urls from any image maps you create using standard HTML.



New : We've added a user-agent string ("XmlSitemapGenerator - http://xmlsitemapgenerator.org").

You can now see our spider activity more clearly in your server logs by looking for the user-agent string that our spider uses. This makes it easier to filter out the activity when doing stats.

Fix : Removed advance filters user interface as there we're never functional.

We had this as a demonstrator UI that was never implemented, but it leaked in to our production environment so we removed it. Oops!


Please note : changes prior to 1st Jan 2013 do not feature in our online change log.