Improved HTML sitemaps format

Wednesday, 30 April 2014

We've improved and simplified the HTML sitemap feature.

Your pages will now display in a simplified hierarchy based on the order in which our spider finds them, instead of the flat list.

We also removed the URL to keep the list simpler.



New responsive XmlSitemapGenerator website

Sunday, 27 April 2014

If you are a regular user of XmlSitemapGenerator.org you'll notice that we've made some  changes to our website. The big change is the responsive design to work better across different screen sizes and as a result you now get much friendlier look and feel even on a phone.


Before Mobile
After Mobile
Before Browser
After Browser
Achieving this kind of functionality is surprisingly easy. We use the Zurb Foundation Framework and we would highly recommend you check it out!



Do XML sitemaps improve SEO (Seach Engine Optimisation)?

Wednesday, 16 April 2014

There is a great divide within the SEO community on the value in submitting a sitemaps to search engines.

One thing is clear if you have a poor website navigation structure it  wont help search engines find your pages, but your users may not be so impressed!

So why might webmasters consider creating a XML sitemap?
  • It could help with search engines figuring out canonical URLs, although a http 301 redirect is often better.
  • The last modified date field in the sitemap file will help search engines understand which pages are changing and when, faster than an organic crawl of your website.
  • Information about the pages such as priority and change frequency can help search engines understand and target relevant areas of your website.
  • They can also help ensure the validity of links and urls in your website as part of the generation process.
As with  SEO itself there are some grey areas subject to fierce debate, yet there is certainly some validity to using XML sitemaps. For Google and others to maintain systems to support them does suggest they hold some value and they offer some support when using Google and Bing webmaster tools.

Perhaps most significantly with a free XML sitemap generator, why not at least give it a try and measure the results yourself?

Sitemap generation performance issues

Sunday, 13 April 2014

We would like to apologise for the recent variable performance over the last few days. We believe we are now starting to get it back under control....

The recent improvements created some additional problems when dealing with slow websites and hung connections. Some websites started locking up resources that were not being released quick enough  to serve other sitemap requests.

To address this we have added a number of controls to the existing list which are summarised below.

ControlStatusDescription
Max of 1000 pagesExistingThis was  recently increased from 250 to 1000
Page size of 80KUpdatedThis was 100K, but to improve performance we had to bring it down. The majority of websites should be unaffected by this.
Response time 30sNewYour website must respond to a request and send all of the page content within 30 seconds. For the majority websites this should not be an issue.
3 concurrent downloadsNewThis has been increased from 1 to 3 to improve sitemap generation speed.

We are continuing to monitor the situation and make further improvements over the coming days.

Faster 1000 page XML sitemaps and still free!

Monday, 7 April 2014

1000 pages 


We are please to announce a new milestone! We have increased the sitemap file limit to 1000 urls and best of all the service remains free to all.

To help enable this we have also been working on the system performance and have introduced a couple of new features to aid this transition.

Faster parallel page processing


We now scan ahead and download multiple pages in parallel so that the spider engine is not kept waiting for pages. this means we can process pages faster. This will put a slight increase load on your server, but this should not be a problem for most websites. If you wish to disable the feature simply click on advanced settings and un-tick the "Multi threading" check box.


100Kb max page size


One limitation we have introduced is on web page file size. The majority of users will not be affected by this, however any web pages that exceed 100K will only be partially downloaded to protect resources. If your pages are over 100Kb we would strongly urge you to fix this as this is very large indeed and even 50Kb would be excessive especially in the mobile world.

Fixes

There was an issue with processing iFrame urls which has now been fixed.

We've also done some work to help prevent our spider tripping over bad HTML as this is where most of our low ratings come from.