Guidance blog posts
📌 More XML Sitemap Settings
Tuesday 13 May 2014
More XML Sitemap Settings Did you know that if you choose the “More settings” option you can get more control over how our spider will index your website and generate your sitemap? Give it a try and find out for yourself!
📌 How do meta robots noindex and nofollow influence my sitemap?
Saturday 3 May 2014
How do meta robots noindex and nofollow influence my sitemap? We try our best to process urls in the same way search engines do. This article gives a quick overview of how the meta robots tag influences your sitemap index , nofollow Applies to : We include this page in your sitemap, but do not follow any of the links on it. noindex, follow Applies to : We do not include this page in your sitemap, but we follow any of the links on it.
📌 Do XML sitemaps improve SEO (Seach Engine Optimisation)?
Wednesday 16 April 2014
Do XML sitemaps improve SEO (Seach Engine Optimisation)? There is a great divide within the SEO community on the value in submitting a sitemaps to search engines. One thing is clear if you have a poor website navigation structure it wont help search engines find your pages, but your users may not be so impressed! So why might webmasters consider creating a XML sitemap? It could help with search engines figuring out canonical URLs, although a http 301 redirect is often better.
📌 How long does it take to generate my XML sitemap?
Friday 14 March 2014
How long does it take to generate my XML sitemap? Our spider can sometimes take a while to process your website and people ask how long they should wait. The time to generate a sitemap can vary quite dramatically from a few seconds to over 10 minutes and this can be influenced by a number of factors. Key Influencing Factors Your website performance The key limiting factor will usually be how fast your website / web server can respond to our spiders requests.
📌 Why do you limit the number of URLs in a sitemap?
Sunday 9 March 2014
Why do you limit the number of URLs in a sitemap? We get asked this quite a lot….. The main reason is that XmlsSitemapGenerator is a free tool and generating sitemaps is not a free process. Our spider indexes thousands of pages a day utilizing lots of server resources (Memory, CPU and bandwidth) and racking up gigabytes of data as it indexes pages and builds up profiles. The overhead of the spidering process is quite large especially at busy times when we have many people generating sitemaps.
📌 Problems creating your XML sitemap?
Sunday 23 February 2014
Problems creating your XML sitemap? Some users experience problems when they create a XML sitemap because of how their website is implemented and hosted. Here are some common problems with websites that result in inconsistent xml sitemaps. Server / performance issues Inconsistent urls / domains iFramed homepage Bad header tags Incorrect server tags Page size too large No “real” links / Non native behaviors Inconsistent behavior for different user agents / browsers Poor HTML mark up Incorrect use of character sets Incorrect modified date header Server / performance issues
📌 How to publish your xml sitemap
Wednesday 14 August 2013
How to publish your xml sitemap Once you have created your xml sitemap you will need to publish it to make search engines aware of its existence. This article provides an overview of how to publish your sitemap once you have created it. There are a number of ways to do this but the quickest and easiest is to upload your sitemap to your website and set the robots.txt file.
📌 What are RSS Sitemaps?
Wednesday 1 May 2013
What are RSS Sitemaps? RSS feeds are typically about informing search engines, directories and your users about new and updated content although they can also be used to detail all the pages in your website. The good thing about RSS feeds is that you can list all your new and updated webpages and submit them to the search engines and directories to improve the inclusion of new content. RSS feeds are essentialy XML data about the pages or information in your website e.
📌 What are Xml Sitemaps?
Wednesday 5 December 2012
What are Xml Sitemaps? Sitemaps provide a way for you to tell search engines about the pages on your website that might not otherwise be found, as well as provide additional supporting information about the pages. They are essentially a structured list of all the pages in your website. As well as the list of pages you can advise search engines on when the page was last updated, how often it is updated and the relative priority of each page within your website