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
-
Is single H1 tag still best practice?
Hi Guys, Is having a single h1 tag still best practice for SEO? Guessing multiple h1 tags dilute the value of the tag and keywords within the tag. Thoughts? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
Best practice for deindexing large quantities of pages
We are trying to deindex a large quantity of pages on our site and want to know what the best practice for doing that is. For reference, the reason we are looking for methods that could help us speed it up is we have about 500,000 URLs that we want deindexed because of mis-formatted HTML code and google indexed them much faster than it is taking to unindex them unfortunately. We don't want to risk clogging up our limited crawl log/budget by submitting a sitemap of URLs that have "noindex" on them as a hack for deindexing. Although theoretically that should work, we are looking for white hat methods that are faster than "being patient and waiting it out", since that would likely take months if not years with Google's current crawl rate of our site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teddef0 -
Can't generate a sitemap with all my pages
I am trying to generate a site map for my site nationalcurrencyvalues.com but all the tools I have tried don't get all my 70000 html pages... I have found that the one at check-domains.com crawls all my pages but when it writes the xml file most of them are gone... seemingly randomly. I have used this same site before and it worked without a problem. Can anyone help me understand why this is or point me to a utility that will map all of the pages? Kindly, Greg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Best practice for expandable content
We are in the middle of having new pages added to our website. On our website we will have a information section containing various details about a product, this information will be several paragraphs long. we were wanting to show the first paragraph and have a read more button to show the rest of the content that is hidden. Whats googles view on this, is this bad for seo?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Why is my servers ip address showing up in Webmaster Tools?
In links to my site in Google Webmaster Tools I am showing over 28,000 links from an ip address. The ip address is the address that my server is hosted on. For example it shows 200.100.100.100/help, almost like there are two copies of my site, one under the domain name and one under the ip address. Is this bad? Or is it just showing up there and Google knows that it is the same since the ip and domain are from the same server?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images
Hi Mozzers, We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed. The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT. If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are. The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'. That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt. As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt. There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml. Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in. Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load. To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1. Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change. But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact. The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed? The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue. Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this. I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough. Thank you for taking the time to read and help. Regards, Mark Oz6HzKO rYD3ICZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Sitemap in SERPS
What's up guys, Having some troubles with SERP rankings. My sitemap (navigation) is appearing instead of my actual keywords. I have tried a few methods to fix this; setting a preferred domain, using a 301 redirects, deleting out of date pages via Google webmaster tools. Nothing seems to work. My next step was to refresh the cache for my entire site - does anyone know how to do this? Can't see any tools... Any help would be great. Cheers, Jon.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjk240 -
What's your best hidden SEO secret?
Don't take that question too serious but all answers are welcome 😉 Answer to all:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | petrakraft
"Gentlemen, I see you did you best - at least I hope so! But after all I suppose I am stuck here to go on reading the SEOmoz blog if I can't sqeeze more secrets from you!9