Help
Online XML Sitemap Generator Support This section covers support for a free and subscription based online XML Sitemap Generator.
What is an RSS or XML sitemap? Traditioanlly people would think of a sitemap as a webpage that helps an indivdiual find content by a structured menu/list of content.
RSS and XML sitemaps are a vital component of website maintainance and SEO, serving as a means to communicate with search engines and facilitate the discovery of web content. In addition to the ubiquitous XML sitemaps, this document will also touch upon other formats such as RSS and HTML sitemaps.
Quick start guide (advanced version) Before you get started with the advanced, we recommend you try the free version first to check compatibility with your website and ensure it meets your needs. You can quickly try the free version without a payment card or even registering.
Try for free Go advanced Registering To use the advanced versions you need to register for an account with your email address.
Select you plan Once registered, you’ll be redirected to enter your website and select your plan.
XML Sitemap Example If you are familiar with RSS feeds you can think of an XML sitemap a bit like a special RSS feed for all of your website. An XML sitemap uses XML to represent all the pages of your website in a structured format to provide search engines with important information about the content of your website .
The Sitemap protocol is an open standard supported by the main search engines including Google, Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Baidu and more.
XML Sitemap Generator Tools Support This section covers support for our free support tools including ping and diagnostics.
General XML Sitemap Help and Support This section covers general help and support information relating to XML sitemaps.
Basic Sitemap Configuration If using the free edition you can just edit the basic settings.
Opening your sitemap If you are using the advanced version, once you have setup your account you can access your sitemaps via your account menu.
You then edit your settings using the blue cog icon.
Basic XML Sitemap settings The core elements of an XML Sitemap are :
Web page address Last modified date Update frequency Relative priority These provide hints to search engines about your pages, when and how often they are updated and the relative importance within your website.
Which is the best XML Sitemap Generator for you? There are a range of sitemap generators available for your website and they come in a number of forms. Online spiders, tools to download and run on your PC as well as scripts to install on your server. Which sitemap generator is best for you will depend on your circumstances.
Some questions to think about when choosing your sitemap generator include:
Webpage Diagnostic Tool The page diagnostic tool helps you understand how our spider and others like it see your webpage. It can help identiy common issues in particular as it relates to creating your sitemap and SEO.
Try it Server response Basic information your server provided when we requested the page.
Page links A list of links we found on your webpage.
Page images A list of images we found on your webpage.
Filtering Sitemap Pages You can optionally set other page inclusion / exclusion criteria to help tailor your sitemap.
Additional file extentions By default we include all HTML pages in your sitemap and our spider willparse them looking for links to other pages. If you want to include other file types that are not html/text you can enter them here.
We include some common ones by default such as pdf, office documents, etc.
Basic HTML concepts This page provides basic information about key HTML concepts which are helpful when it comes to sitemaps and how our spider processes your website.
Head meta tags In the header of your page there can sometimes be tags that direct search engines and our spider. For most pages you will want it to index and follow. Our spider automatically follows these rules.
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> Links and query strings The XmlSitemapGenerator will follow all standard links such as the below example
Sitemap Image Settings Configure if and how images are included in your sitemap using various inclusion and exclusion rules.
Primerily you can include images on wether your image tag has an alt and/or title tag, or include all images.
<img src="/imags/someimage.webp" alt="Alternative text" title="Image title"> Image extentions You can also set what image file extensions to include by entering them. By default this is blank and all image extensions are included.
Other Sitemap Settings These are more miscellaneous settings that relate to the sitemap generation process.
Extensions to ignore When we spider a web page we look for links. Each link gets processed to check for HTML / text content which we then search for more links.
Contacting the server and downloading headers / content takes time, so excluding certain files from this process can dramatically improve performance for larger websites with lots of none text pages.
Robots.txt sitemap entries The robots.txt file is a file based tool for controlling how search engines crawl and index your website. One of its key features is the ability to specify the location of your XML sitemap(s). Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it:
Create or Access Your robots.txt File: If you don’t already have a robots.txt file, you can create one in the root directory of your website.
Filtering sitemap pages and images Filtering is a powerful feature that allows you to precisely control which pages and images are excluded from your sitemap in our online and windows sitemap generator. This guide will walk you through the process of creating filtering rules using expressions, ranging from simple wildcard expressions to more advanced techniques. We follow the ANSI-92 standard for our filtering expressions.
Simple Wildcard Filters Wildcard expressions provide a flexible way to match URLs based on patterns.
Sitemap Reports When the sitemap jobs completes you are automatically redirected to a summary report of the process. If you are using the advanced version, you can also access this page from your account sitemaps page.
Sitemap summary The summary page provides an overview about the process, including links found, pages and images.
Filtered are those that were excluded for one reason or another, a rule or redirect. Errors are those where the server responded with an error or the spider experienced an error when trying to process a page.
Publishing Your XML Sitemap and Notifying Search Engines It is assumed that you have generated your sitemap and uploaded to a suitable location on your website or blog (usually the root folder).
The next step is to ensure it is accessible and known to search engines.
Robots.txt It is important to include your sitemap in your robots.txt file as this will ensure it is organically doscoverable however it should be noted that this alone does not ensure your website and sitemap ges discovered.
XML Sitemaps Frequently Asked Questions What is an XML sitemap? An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages of your website, providing essential information to search engines like Google about the structure and content of your site. You can find more on the What is an XML sitemap page.
Why do I need an XML sitemap? An XML sitemap helps search engines discover and index your web pages more efficiently.
Change Log 2.0.0 Oct 3rd, 2023
New version of our online XML Sitemap Generator Launched. Old version moved to https://legacy.xmlsitemapgenerator.org Saturday, 9 May 2020 New : Hosting arrangements New : Updated Canonical URL rules New : Robots meta and rel nofollow / no index rules New : Diagnostic tool improvements New : Increased the max page size to 300Kb New : Detect Javascript sites and warn New : Detect and warn about 403 Thursday, 19 March 2020 New : Privacy policy updates.
RSS Sitemap Ping Tool Once you have created your sitemap and uploaded it to your website, the RSS sitemap ping tool helps you submit your website’s RSS sitemap to various feed aggregators.
Try it You will need to enter :
The name for your website, Your website address (homepage) and The address of your RSS feed and click submit. We’ll then send a notification to each of the feed agregators.
XML Sitemap Ping Tool Once you have created your sitemap and uploaded it to your website, the XML sitemap ping tool will submit your website’s XML sitemap to key search engines.
Try it To use the tool you just need to enter your XML Sitemap’s web address.
We’ll then send a notification to seacrch engines and show the results below.
Note that for free users we limit the number of times you can use this tool in a given period, but subscribing users get unlimited use.