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 would you create and then segment a large sitemap?
-
I have a site with around 17,000 pages and would like to create a sitemap and then segment it into product categories.
Is it best to create a map and then edit it in something like xmlSpy or is there a way to silo sitemap creation from the outset?
-
Thanks Saijo,
We are trying to silo product types/categories and break them into different sitemaps. I'm familiar with SF but I don't think it will create sitemaps with the granularity that we are looking for.
I'm using XMLSpy but I'm finding it hard to break out blocks of content.
-
To my knowledge, Screaming Frog doesn't allow you to create an XML sitemap. Perhaps Excel allows you to format the output from SF but I'm not sure. I did find a utility called XMLSpy which, though pricey, allows me to do some of the sorting I was looking for. Once sorted, I can manually pull out sections to segment my sitemap. It is a pain in the neck because I can determine a silo and do it automatically. That being said, I think I can develop a sitemap template and have our new web programmer to develop a way to auto generate a group of segmented sitemaps.
Anyone know if there is a canned solution that works with IIS?
-
If you site is structured such that the urls contain the categories you wish to sort , you can use something like Screaming Frog ( http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ ) and export all the urls and sort them out via excel in to categories and go that way
NOTE : the free version has a 500 url limit, so you might want to look at paid ( ask them if it can handle 17,00 urls before getting it ) or look at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html ( I haven't used it myself , so don't know if you can export stuff to excel from there )
Good luck mate , sounds like you have a big job ahead of you.
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
-
Resubmit sitemaps on every change?
Hello Mozers, Our sitemaps were submitted to Google and Bing, and are successfully indexed. Every time pages are added to our store (ecommerce), we re-generate the xml sitemap. My question is: should we be resubmitting the sitemaps every time their content change, or since they were submitted once can we assume that the crawlers will re-download the sitemaps by themselves (I don't like to assume). What are best practices here? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | yacpro131 -
Should all pagination pages be included in sitemaps
How important is it for a sitemap to include all individual urls for the paginated content. Assuming the rel next and prev tags are set up would it be ok to just have the page 1 in the sitemap ?
Technical SEO | | Saijo.George0 -
302 redirect used, submit old sitemap?
The website of a partner of mine was recently migrated to a new platform. Even though the content on the pages mostly stayed the same, both the HTML source (divs, meta data, headers, etc.) and URLs (removed index.php, removed capitalization, etc) changed heavily. Unfortunately, the URLs of ALL forum posts (150K+) were redirected using a 302 redirect, which was only recently discovered and swiftly changed to a 301 after the discovery. Several other important content pages (150+) weren't redirected at all at first, but most now have a 301 redirect as well. The 302 redirects and 404 content pages had been live for over 2 weeks at that point, and judging by the consistent day/day drop in organic traffic, I'm guessing Google didn't like the way this migration went. My best guess would be that Google is currently treating all these content pages as 'new' (after all, the source code changed 50%+, most of the meta data changed, the URL changed, and a 302 redirect was used). On top of that, the large number of 404's they've encountered (40K+) probably also fueled their belief of a now non-worthy-of-traffic website. Given that some of these pages had been online for almost a decade, I would love Google to see that these pages are actually new versions of the old page, and therefore pass on any link juice & authority. I had the idea of submitting a sitemap containing the most important URLs of the old website (as harvested from the Top Visited Pages from Google Analytics, because no old sitemap was ever generated...), thereby re-pointing Google to all these old pages, but presenting them with a nice 301 redirect this time instead, hopefully causing them to regain their rankings. To your best knowledge, would that help the problems I've outlined above? Could it hurt? Any other tips are welcome as well.
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL0 -
Using Sitemap Generator - Good/Bad?
Hi all I recently purchased the full licence of XML Sitemap Generator (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html) but have yet used it. The idea behind this is that I can deploy the package on each large e-commerce website I build and the sitemap will be generated as often as I set it be and the search engines will also be pinged automatically to inform them of the update. No more manual XML sitemap creation for me! Now it sounds great but I do not know enough about pinging search engines with XML sitemap updates on a regular basis and if this is a good or bad thing? Can it have any detrimental effect when the sitemap is changing (potentially) every day with new URLs for products being added to the site? Any thoughts or optinions would be greatly appreciated. Kris
Technical SEO | | yousayjump0 -
Video Sitemaps <video:content_loc>and<video:player_loc></video:player_loc></video:content_loc>
Hi guys, If I'm creating a video sitemap do I need to use both: video:content_locandvideo:player_loc</video:player_loc></video:content_loc> Or could I just use video:content_loc?</video:content_loc> Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tug-Agency0 -
How to create a tree-like structure map of a website?
Hi all, The online marketing manager requested to make a tree-like map of the website. He means that he would like to see a graphical representation of the website and his contents. This way we will be able to see if there are internal link issues. The problem is that there are thousands of pages and many subdomains, manual labour would make this a very tedious task. If you would get this question, how would you try to solve this? Any software recommendation?
Technical SEO | | djingel10 -
Should XML sitemaps include *all* pages or just the deeper ones?
Hi guys, Ok this is a bit of a sitemap 101 question but I cant find a definitive answer: When we're running out XML sitemaps for google to chew on (we're talking ecommerce and directory sites with many pages inside sub-categories here) is there any point in mentioning the homepage or even the second level pages? We know google is crawling and indexing those and we're thinking we should trim the fat and just send a map of the bottom level pages. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | timwills0 -
/index.php in sitemap? take it out?
Hi Everyone, The following was automatically generated at xml-sitemaps.com Should I get rid of the index.php url from my sitemap? If so, how do I go about redirecting it in my htaccess ? <url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/</loc></url>
Technical SEO | | RogersSEO
<url><loc>http://www.mydomain.ca/index.php</loc></url> thank you in advance, Martin0