How can I get an XML sitemap in the order that I want?
-
I use Screaming Frog and Xenu on a daily basis and I use them for sitemap creation, but the functionality is limited. With huge sites, it's really easy to create an ordered list of URLs for the sitemap in excel or word and upload that to Screaming Frog to crawl. The only problem is that it won't export the sitemap in the order that I uploaded it. Does anybody know of a tool that will do this or am I doomed to sit an manually arrange the URLs the way I want?
-
Pleasure, glad it helped!
-
Thanks Marcus! I've done some research on it and had some people say to keep the most important URLs at the top and least important at the bottom, but now I"m seeing alot more people say that order doesn't matter. Which is great, cuz as you said, that would not be a fun Friday afternoon.
-
Hey Michael
I guess the obvious question here is why do you care about the order? I have never seen anything over on http://www.sitemaps.org that indicated that the order was of any importance and in fact, if you check the FAQ they have this statement.
Q: <a id="faq_url_position" name="faq_url_position"></a>Does position of a URL in a Sitemap influence its use?
No. The position of a URL in the Sitemap is not likely to impact how it is used or regarded by search engines.
So, I would not stress, make sure everything else is right and forget about the order as that seems like a really horrid cut and paste job for a Friday afternoon.
Hope this helps
Marcus
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
-
A client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
How to get sitelinks in organic SERPs?
When searching for "Madrid hotels" in google I see that the top organic search results have one row of sitelinks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
What can I do that also my site shows sitelinks if I am among the top organic search results?
Anything onpage that I can do to increase probability that google will show sitelinks? Strangely the text which shows as sitelink for SERPs from booking.com and tripadvisor does actually for most of the sitelinks not appear on the landing page (I also checked the source code).0 -
International Sitemaps
Hey Dudes, Quick question about international sitemaps. Basically we have a mix of subfolders, subdirectories, and ccTLDs for our different international/language sites. With this in mind how do you recommend we set up the site map. I'm thinking the best solution would be to move the subfolders and subdirectories onto an index and put the ccTLD site maps on their own root only. domain.ca/sitemap (This would only contain the Canada pages) domain.com, fr.domain.com, domain.com/eu/ (These pages would all have an index on domain.com/sitemap that points to each language/nations index) OR Should all site have a site map under their area. domain.com/sitemap, fr.domain.com/sitemap, domain.com/eu/sitemap, domain.ca/sitemap? I'm very new to international SEO. I know that our current structure probably isn't ideal... but it's what I've inherited. I just want to make sure I get a good foundation going here. So any tips are much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blake.runyon0 -
Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?
We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?1 -
How to get a page re-crawed quickly
Does anyone know a way to get Google to re-crawl a webpage that does not belong to me. There are a bunch of pages that I have had links removed on and I want Google to re-crawl those pages to see the links have been removed. (current wait time is way way too long) Can anyone suggest some ways to get the page re-crawled. (I am unable to get the website owners to use WMT to do anything). Suggestions like good ping services and various other techniques would be very much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Can you create Flickr Group Snippets?
A few years ago, I established about 25 different flickr groups. Part experiment to see if it would help with SEO (at the time Flickr groups were do follow) and also to promote my travel website Most of these groups are now on the front page for their keyword. Most of them show the standard Flickr Snippet, but a few don't. I'm wondering if any brainiacs know how to get all of them to show a custom snip. Here's one that has a unique snip http://www.flickr.com/groups/best-san-francisco-restaurants/ the Best San Francisco Restaurants group icon ... Group Stats - traffic & page views for Best Restaurants San Francisco · JulieMarg, 0, 35 months ago ... http://www.flickr.com/groups/travel-like-james-bond-007/ Oct 12, 2008 – the Travel Like James Bond group icon ... On my website, I've got a post about Traveling like James Bond, detailing hotels & places & events ... and one that shows the standard (it's AT&T Park San Frrancisco) http://www.flickr.com/groups/711180@N24/ Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world, securely ...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | juliemarg0 -
Lost positions, how to get them back?
Ok, like 1 year ago my site was doing good in google search engine. But I decided to change CMS and design of the site. Did some mistakes like, changed site links structure (when I notice it later I changed it back), then some of the pages were lost because I simply didn't need them on the new cms and there were no feature of keeping them. Site has a lot of backlinks and was strong in rankings. It's been almost a year or maybe already a year and I can't get even to top100 for those keywords... But I was in (top10-20) Site is still getting links, ranking well on yahoo and baidu, but google, just won't let my main keywords to come back. I rank for some that doesn't make sense to me and I even wasn't working on them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onmaso0 -
What is the best method for segmenting HTML sitemaps?
Sitemaps create a Table of Contents for web crawlers and users alike. Understanding how PageRank is passed, HTML sitemaps play a critical role in how Googlebot and other crawlers spider and catalog content. I get asked this question a lot and, in most cases, it's easy to categorize sitemaps and create 2-3 category-based maps that can be linked to from the global footer. However, what do you do when a client has 40 categories with 200+ pages of content under each category? How do you segment your HTML sitemap in a case like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman0