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World Wide Web

Sitemap

What is XML Sitemap ?

 

In general, this is a list of URLs for your website in a form of XML file (it also known as Google Sitemap because it was introduced first by Google). Besides that it allows you to include additional information about each URL such as the date it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is. XML format ensures that this information can be easily processed on different kinds of computers, applications and systems, so Search engines (Google, Yahoo/Bing, Ask, AOL etc) won’t have any problems with understanding your sitemap files.

 

XML Sitemap sample:

        <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
        <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
            <url>
                <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
                <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
                <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
                <priority>0.8</priority>
            </url>
            <url>
                <loc>http://www.example.com/about.htm</loc>
                <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
            </url>
        </urlset>

 

The sitemap example above contains 2 URLs and all of the allowed optional tags:<lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority>.

There are a couple of limitations imposed by Google: a single XML sitemap file can contain not more then 50,000 URLs and may not be larger than 10 Megabytes.

Why do you need a Sitemap

…because it allows you to inform search engines about important pages on your website. That increases its visibility to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc, and ensures indexing of the web pages that might not be discovered otherwise. Those provide additional information about your site to searching engines, complementing their traditional methods of crawling the web. All major search engines use the same XML-based protocol for that. This means that having an XML Sitemap will let Google, Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing (MSN), and Ask have up-to-date information any time you upload a new map file to your server.

XML Sitemaps are especially helpful if:

  • You have a brand new website
  • Your web-site has dynamic content generated by CMS (Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, DotNetNuke, etc)
  • Your have got a lot of pages
  • You don’t have desired Google PageRank
  • Your website has complex navigation
  • Some of your webpages are either not accessible from the main page and its children, or are burried too deep in the page hierarchy

If you happen to have broken links on your website, our Sitemap Generator will detect those and inform you of all the dead links and the pages these links are on!

How to create XML Sitemap

Creating XML Sitemap is easy with free online XML Sitemap generator. To get xml sitemap generated simply type in your URL and on the next page make selections for 3 optional parameters – page changing frequency, last modified date and page priority. See sitemap maker page screenshot.

What is “Page changing frequency”?
This value indicates how frequently the content at a particular URL is likely to change.

What is “Last modified date”?
The time the URL was last modified. This information allows search engines’ crawlers to avoid recrawling documents that haven’t changed. You can let the generator take the information from your server or specify your own date and time.

What is “Page priority”?
The priority of a particular page relative to other pages on the same website. As Google specified the value for this tag is a number between 0.0 and 1.0 where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your website, and 1.0 – the highest. The default priority of a page is 0.5. Note that our map builder can generate page priorities for youautomatically by analyzing relative positions of your web pages in the website tree.

Create your Google sitemap now with our online Sitemap Maker

Uploading your XML Sitemap

Uploading is very easy: just download the generated sitemap.xml file from ourdownload page and place it into the root directory of your website (most of the time root directory is the directory where your index file is).

Is it safe?

Yes, web-site-map.com xml sitemap builder browses only web pages that are freely accessible by everyone. Content restricted by your robots.txt file from Google, Yahoo/Bing, and other search engines will not be included in your sitemap.xml file: the online generator script will simply skip it.

Learn more about XML Sitemaps

For more information on this subject please visit www.sitemaps.org or see Google Sitemap-related pages at www.google.com/support/webmasters….

Why Web-Site-Map.com

  • Our free online Generator features unique combination of user-friendly interfaces with very rich functionality.
  • The mapper script has the most accurate in the Internet handling of dynamicallygenerated web pages (e.g. created by Joomla), Cookies, session IDs, page redirects (including javascript redirects!), foreign languages, escaped and encoded URLs, and even Vector Markup Language (VML). The generated sitemap files are accepted by Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc and and have proven to be 100% compatible with all major search engines!
  • The generator supports national languages (any local charsets and character encodings including UTF-8 etc) and has got a sophisticated retry logic to deal with distant hosts and slow networks.
  • Page priorities can be either generated automatically or set manually.
  • The Web-Site-Map crawler always obeys robots.txt files and follow robots.txt rules as per Google’s recommendations.
  • Web-Site-Map webbased service is 100% online tool. This means that you don’t need to install any software on your computer, or upload any PHP scripts to your website. Moreover – you will be able to create your free site-map files on any computer no mater if it’s Mac, PC, iPad, or Android device, and whether it runs Windows, Mac / Apple OS, OSX, HP WebOS, Linux or UNIX. Microsoft Windows 7 is fully supported. The same is true from content management perspective: you may manage you content manually or use CMS like Joomla – in all cases our crawlerwill always work well for you!
  • Our Google/XML/Sitemap creator comes with a free broken link checker that detects and reports broken links right while making your Google site-map. Note that in order to use this broken-links checker you need to make a map with our online xml sitemap maker. As an alternative way of addressing the link rot problem you can consider our brand new standalone broken link checker that is capable of reporting all major linking problems and HTTP reponse codes. So you can use thethe checking service any time even without any google site-map files generated. Remember to use Link Checker tools periodically to ensure constant health of your Internet resources. Joomla and other dynamic content management system are fully supported!

 

  • Our online service also offers a build-in Sitemap validator that validates generated site-map files and reports whether the XML is well-formed and valid. Note thatwellformness and its compliance with the XML Schema are critical factors: otherwiseGoogle, Bing, and Yahoo etc won’t be able to understand your sitemap. Choose your generator as weel as other SEO tools wisely to make sure that your web optimization efforts won’t be wasted!
  • New: Our free sitemap creator has very high page limit which became dynamicrecently: now the value is assigned based on actual server resources availability (the less busy our servers are the higher current page limit is) and thus the value changes very frequently through the day. See its most recent value here. (it’s not 1500 / 2500 / 3000 pages we used to have – it’s much higher now, and thus can fit even bigger web portals easily)

 

  • This service is capable of handling any website no matter if it’s coded by hand – with pure HTML / XHTML, or is based on PHP, ASP, JSP, Cold Fusion etc or is built using Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, DotNetNuke, Magento, or any other CMS and e-Commerce platforms.

All this makes web-site-map generator a valuable everyday SEO tool for web designers and webmasters. Create your free map file today with our premium online builder and submit to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Ask.

More cool features are coming soon including higher free limits.

No-limit commercial version is available – contact us for details!

Make your web-site Google friendly by mapping it using our tool! Also don’t forget to check our collection of SEO links for other useful SEOtools and website promotion resources!

Have you tried our Broken Link Checker ?

We recently added to the family of our online SEO tools a standalone dead link finder BrokenLinkCheck.com that detects bad links and highlights broken links’ locations right in your HTML codeFinding and fixing stale hyperlinks has never been easier!

The link checking tool makes results available in real-time so no waiting is involved: you can start fixing broken links right away while our broken link detector is validating the rest of your links!

 

Recommended online sitemap generator:

1. http://www.web-site-map.com/xml_sitemap.php

2. http://www.rapidsitemap.com/

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