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.
How Do I Generate a Sitemap for a Large Wordpress Site?
-
Hello Everyone!
I am working with a Wordpress site that is in Google news (i.e. everyday we have about 30 new URLs to add to our sitemap) The site has years of articles, resulting in about 200,000 pages on the site. Our strategy so far has been use a sitemap plugin that only generates the last few months of posts, however we want to improve our SEO and submit all the URLs in our site to search engines.
The issue is the plugins we've looked at generate the sitemap on-the-fly. i.e. when you request the sitemap, the plugin then dynamically generates the sitemap. Our site is so large that even a single request for our sitemap.xml ties up tons of server resources and takes an extremely long time to generate the sitemap (if the page doesn't time out in the process).
Does anyone have a solution?
Thanks,
Aaron
-
In my case, xml-sitempas works extremely good. I fully understand that a DB solution would avoid the crawl need, but the features that I get from xml-sitemaps are worth it.
I am running my website on a powerful dedicated server with SSDs, so perhaps that's why I'm not getting any problems plus I set limitations on the generator memory consumption and activated the feature that saves temp files just in case the generation fails.
-
My concern with recommending xml-sitemaps was that I've always had problems getting good, complete maps of extremely large sites. An internal CMS-based tool is grabbing pages straight from the database instead of having to crawl for them.
You've found that it gets you a pretty complete crawl of your 5K-page site, Federico?
-
I would go with the paid solution of xml-sitemaps.
You can set all the resources that you want it to have available, and it will store in temp files to avoid excessive consumption.
It also offers settings to create large sitemaps using a sitemap_index and you could get plugins that create the news sitemap automatically looking for changes since the last sitemap generation.
I have it running in my site with 5K pages (excluding tag pages) and it takes 10 minutes to crawl.
Then you also have plugins that create the sitemaps dynamically, like SEO by Yoast, Google XML Sitemaps, etc.
-
I think the solution to your server resource issue is to create multiple sitemaps, Aaron. Given that the sitemap protocol only allows 50,000 URLs max. per sitemap and Google News sitemaps can't be over 1000 URLs, this was going to be a necessity anyway, so may as well use these limitations to your advantage.
There's a functionality available for sitemaps called a sitemap index. It basically lists all the sitemap.xmls you've created, so the search engines can find and index them. You put it at the root of the site and then link to it in robots.txt just like a regular sitemap. (Can also submit it in GWT). In fact, Yoast's SEO plugin sitemaps and others use just this functionality already for their News add-on.
In your case, you could build the News sitemap dynamically to meet its special requirements (up to 1000 URLs and will crawl only last 2 days of posts) and to ensure it's up-to-the-minute accurate, as is critical for news sites.
Then separately you would build additional, segmented sitemaps for the existing 200,000 pages. Since these are historical pages, you could easily serve them from static files, since they wouldn't need to update once created. By having them static, there's be no server load to serve them each time - only the load to generate the current news sitemap. (I'd actually recommend you keep each static sitemap to around 25,000 pages each to ensure search engines can crawl them easily)
This approach would involve a bit of fiddling to initially set up, as you'd need to generate the "archive" sitemaps then convert them to static versions, but once set up, the News sitemap would take care of itself and once a month (or whatever you decide) you'd need to add the "expiring" pages from the News sitemap to the most recent "archive" segment. A smart programmer might even be able to automate that process.
Does this approach sound like it might solve your problem?
Paul
P.S. Since you'd already have the sitemap index capability, you could also add video and image sitemaps to your site if appropriate.
-
Have you ever tried using a web-based sitemap generator? Not sure how it would respond to your site but at least it would be running on someone else's server, right?
Not sure what else to say honestly.
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
-
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 1, 2018, 12:12 PM | Cin7_Marketing0 -
Sitemap generator which only includes canonical urls
Does anyone know of a 3rd party sitemap generator that will only include the canonical url's? Creating a sitemap with geo and sorting based parameters isn't the most ideal way to generate sitemaps. Please let me know if anyone has any ideas. Mind you we have hundreds of thousands of indexed url's and this can't be done with a simple text editor.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 2, 2015, 6:58 PM | recbrands0 -
Wordpress Comments Pagination
Hi Mozzers What is your view on the following. Should you Paginate comments to increase page speed? If yes, at what # of comments would you begin pagination? (with the objective being decreasing page load times) Apply rel="canonical" back to the main article URL? eg: url/comment-page-1 => url noindex the comment pages? create a "View all" comments page? Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 20, 2015, 3:49 AM | jeremycabral
J0 -
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 | Nov 10, 2014, 12:26 AM | eugene_bgb0 -
302 redirects in the sitemap?
My website uses a prefix at the end to instruct the back-end about visitor details. The setup is similar to this site - http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf with a 302 redirect from the normal link to the one with additional info and a canonical tag on the actual URL without the extra info ((the normal one here being http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com,) However, when I used www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a sitemap they did so using the URLs with the extra info on the links... what should I do to create a sitemap using the normal URLs (which are the ones I want to be promoting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 7, 2013, 10:46 AM | theLotter0 -
Outbound Links to Authority sites
Will outbound links to a related topic on an authority site help, hurt or be irrelevanent for SEO purposes. And if beneficially, should it be Nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 13, 2012, 1:05 AM | VictorVC0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Oct 15, 2015, 5:04 PM | MSWD0 -
Online Sitemap Generator
I have a site that has around 5,000 pages now. Are there any recommened online free/paid tools to generate a sitemap for me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 18, 2014, 6:27 PM | rhysmaster0