Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Best server-side sitemap generators
-
I've been looking into sitemap generators recently and have got a good knowledge of what creating a sitemap for a small website of below 500 URLs involves. I have successfully generated a sitemap for a very small site, but I’m trying to work out the best way of crawling a large site with millions of URLs.
I’ve decided that the best way to crawl such a large number of URLs is to use a server side sitemap, but this is an area that doesn’t seem to be covered in detail on SEO blogs / forums. Could anyone recommend a good server side sitemap generator? What do you think of the automated offerings from Google and Bing? I’ve found a list of server side sitemap generators from Google, but I can’t see any way to choose between them. I realise that a lot will depend on the type of technologies we use server side, but I'm afraid that I don't know them at this time.
-
Unless they have fixed it in recent months, xml-sitemaps does not generate correct video sitemaps.
-
Yeah, they offer free and paid hosted versions too. But I found the server side version much simpler to setup and control.
-
-
Excellent advice Federico. My first reaction was, "but that's not a server-side sitemap generator". I just looked at their website though and it turns out that it is! Looks like I need to read things more carefully!
I'll look into that as an option but if anyone else has any server side sitemap generators that they'd recommend then I'd be really interested to hear about them
-
I have been using xml-sitemaps (paid version) for all my sites over 5 years and they work like a charm, scraping and indexing what it needs to be indexed ans scraped, plus it consumes really low resources. 100% recommended (they have nice plugins too for extra sitempas (video, news, images, etc).
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
One domain - Multiple servers
Can I have the root domain pointing to one server and other URLs on the domain pointing to another server without redirecting, domain masking or HTML masking? Dealing with an old site that is a mess. I want to avoid migrating the old website to the new environment. I want to work on a page by page and section by section basis, and whatever gets ready to go live I will release on the new server while keeping all other pages untouched and live on the old server. What are your recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Faceted Navigation URLs Best Practices
Hi, We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product. All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/ Is this the best practice? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Priority Attribute in XML Sitemaps - Still Valid?
Is the priority value (scale of 0-1) used for each URL in an XML sitemap still a valid way of communicating to search engines which content you (the webmaster) believe is more important relative to other content on your site? I recall hearing that this was no longer used, but can't find a source. If it is no longer used, what are the easiest ways to communicate our preferences to search engines? Specifically, I'm looking to preference the most version version of a product's documentation (version 9) over the previous version (version 8). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Allie_Williams0 -
Mega Menu Navigation Best Practice
First off, I'm a landscape/nature/travel photographer. I mainly sell prints of my work. I'm in the process of redesigning my website, and I'm trying to decide whether to keep the navigation extremely simple or leave the drop-down menu for galleries. Currently, my navigation is something like this: Galleries
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shannmg1
> Gallery for State or Country (example: California)
> Sub-region in State or Country (example: San Francisco)
Blog
Prints
About
Contact Selling prints is the top priority of the website, as that's what runs the business. I have lots of blog content, and I'm starting to build some good travel advice, etc. but in reality, the galleries, which then filter down to individual pages for each photo with a cart system, are the most important. What I'm struggling to decide is whether to leave the sort of "mega menu" for the galleries, or to do away with them, and have the user go to the overall galleries page to navigate further into the site. Leaving the mega menu intact, the galleries page becomes a lot less important, and takes out a step to get to the shopping cart. However, I'm wondering if the amount of galleries in the drop down menu is giving TOO many choices up front as well. I also wonder how changing this will affect search. Any thoughts on which is better or is it really just a matter of preference?0 -
Hreflang in vs. sitemap?
Hi all, I decided to identify alternate language pages of my site via sitemap to save our development team some time. I also like the idea of having leaner markup. However, my site has many alternate language and country page variations, so after creating a sitemap that includes mostly tier 1 and tier 2 level URLs, i now have a sitemap file that's 17mb. I did a couple google searches to see is sitemap file size can ever be an issue and found a discussion or two that suggested keeping the size small and a really old article that recommended keeping it < 10mb. Does the sitemap file size matter? GWT has verified the sitemap and appears to be indexing the URLs fine. Are there any particular benefits to specifying alternate versions of a URL in vs. sitemap? Thanks, -Eugene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_bgb0 -
Slug best practices?
Hello, my team is trying to understand how to best construct slugs. We understand they need to be concise and easily understandable, but there seem to be vast differences between the three examples below. Are there reasons why one might be better than the others? http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/20/bad-boys-yum-yum-violent-criminal-or-not-this-mans-mugshot-is-heating-up-the-web/ http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/06/20/jeremy-meeks-sexy-mug-shot-felon-viral/ http://www.tmz.com/2014/06/19/mugshot-eyes-felon-sexy/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Should canonical links be included or excluded in a sitemap?
Our company is in the process of updating our sitemap. Should we include or exclude canonical links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Changing Server IP Addresses. Should I be concerned?
Hello Mozers Our site has been on a dedicated server for about four years now. (no other sites, just ours on the server) I have made the decision to move it to a much better and faster server than the current server we are on for more than one reason. My big fear is Google will lose trust for my site because of the IP change. Ip's stay with the server at 1and1 they do not follow the website. So, I have done my due diligence and copied over all code and databases and have tested it completely to insure there are no issues when I change the DNS to point to the new server. Made sure 1and1 is giving me an IP that has never been used, I am Keeping the old server on until cached DNS records expire for it. Is there anything else I need to do to make sure I do not lose current rankings in Google? I have heard nightmare stories about making these kinds of changes but at this point for our site there is no turning back this is a change that must take place. Any pointers and advice would be much appreciated! Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbie82991