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
-
Best Practices for Converting PDFs to HTML
We're working with a client who gets about 80% of their organic, inbound search traffic from links to PDF files on their site. Obviously, this isn't ideal, because someone who just downloads a PDF file directly from a Google query is unlikely to interact with the site in any other way. I'm looking to develop a plan to convert those PDF files to HTML content, and try to get at least some of those visitors to convert into subscribers. What's the best way to go about this? My plan so far is: Develop HTML landing pages for each of the popular PDFs, with the content from the PDF, as well as the option to download the PDF with an email signup. Gradually implement 301 redirects for the existing PDFs, and see what that does to our inbound SEO traffic. I don't want to create a dip in traffic, although our current "direct to inbound" traffic is largely useless. Are their things I should watch out for? Will I get penalized by Google for redirecting a PDF to HTML content? Other things I should be aware of?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atourgates0 -
Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?
Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch
Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Exact Syntax for Canonical to PDFs for Windows Server
Hi There, I have got in my web several PDFs with the same content of the HTML version. Thus I need to set up a canonical for each of them in order to avoid duplicate content. In particular, I need to know how to write the exact syntax for the windows server (web.config) in order to implement the canonical to PDF. I surfed the web but it seems I cannot find this piece of info anywhere Thanks a lot!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Midleton0 -
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 -
Domain Name Change - Best Practices?
Good day guys, We got a restaurant that is changing its name and domain. However they are keeping the same server location, same content and same pages (we are just changing the logo on the website). It just has to go a new domain. We don't want to lose the value of the current site, and we want to avoid any duplicate penalties. Could you please advise of the best practices of doing a domain name change? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael-Goode0 -
Best way to merge 2 ecommerce sites
Our Client owns two ecommerce websites. Website A sells 20 related brands. Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google. Website B was purchased from a competitor. It has 1 brand (also sold on site A). Search results are normally high on the first page of google. Client wants to consider merging the two sites. We are looking at options. Option 1: Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A. Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A Option 4: ??? Any thoughts on this would be great. We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EugeneF0 -
Create a new XML Sitemap for a blog subdomain?
What would be the best way to go about this? A site just put a blog on http://blog.domain.com/ Should there be a separate XML Sitemap for that particular subdomain or should the original XML Sitemap for the main domain be sufficient? Looking forward to your responses. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0