HTTPS/SSL Google SEO and XML Sitemaps
Friday, 8 August 2014
Google recently announced that websites with SSL/HTTPS will gain you a minor ranking boost in an effort to improve online security. This gain is likely to be small to start off with to give webmasters time to adapt their servers and websites, but over time this boost is likely to increase making SSL a key part of your SEO strategy.What do you need to do?
A key part of updating your website is ensuring you have an effective transition plan. This will include notifying search engines and directories of your new website structure. Sitemaps should be an element of this SEO strategy:
- Get an SSL certificate with a 2048-bit key
- Apply this to your server
- Update your link structure - hopefully you are already using relative URLS.
- Implement HTTP 301 Moved Permanently to redirect traffic to your secure site.
- If you can't do this you may need a canonical meta tag
- Update your Google XML Sitemap using your new HTTPs address
- Update Google and other search engines with your new sitemap.
Did you know?
You can access XML Sitemap Generator using HTTPS? In light of the news from Google we will be updating to make this default over the next few days.
HTTP / SSL costs less than you think ...
We use 123-reg for hosting, SSL and domains.A basic SSL for 2 years costs only £21.58 (about 36.20 USD or 27 Euros) making it an SEO no-brainer!
Wordpress Sitemap Generator
Wednesday, 6 August 2014
If you need a sitemap for wordpress try our new (July 2015) WordPress Sitemap Generator Plugin. It will give you much more control over your sitemap and integrates directly in to WordPress.Key features :
- Supports HTML, RSS and Google XML Sitemap formats.
- List all your WordPress Pages, Posts, Archives, Authors, Categories and Tags.
- Includes paged links for posts for Archives, Authors, Categories and Tags.
- Set global sitemap default values for priorty and update frequencies.
- Set sitemap value for priority and frequency at the category, tag, post and page level.
- Automatic daily auto ping when you have updated pages / posts in WordPress.
- Add latest pages / posts RSS feed to page header.
- Updates your Robots.txt file with sitemap entries.
Of course you can still use our regualr Xml Sitemap Generator with WordPress if it offers you a quicker and simpler alternative :
- Simply point us at your WordPress website .
- We'll spider your website content.
- Download your sitemaps from our website and
- upload them to your WordPress account.
Don't forget that by default the WordPress dashboard limits the type of files you can upload. Not all hosting providers support all file types. Your system administrator can update WordPress to allow you to upload XML and HTML sitemaps to your account. Alternatively you can use a plugin that enables richer file upload capability.
Baidu, Yandex sitemaps and fixes
Monday, 4 August 2014
Our sitemaps have always been compatible with Yandex and Baidu. We've now added them to the ping feature for RSS sitemaps so that you can easily notify them about your sitemap updates. If you have other services that would be useful please feel free to get in touch.Some users were experiencing problems with the "download all" zip file containing empty files. We believe that issue is now resolved.Please let us know if you experience any more problems.
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