How can I get an XML sitemap in the order that I want?
-
I use Screaming Frog and Xenu on a daily basis and I use them for sitemap creation, but the functionality is limited. With huge sites, it's really easy to create an ordered list of URLs for the sitemap in excel or word and upload that to Screaming Frog to crawl. The only problem is that it won't export the sitemap in the order that I uploaded it. Does anybody know of a tool that will do this or am I doomed to sit an manually arrange the URLs the way I want?
-
Pleasure, glad it helped!
-
Thanks Marcus! I've done some research on it and had some people say to keep the most important URLs at the top and least important at the bottom, but now I"m seeing alot more people say that order doesn't matter. Which is great, cuz as you said, that would not be a fun Friday afternoon.
-
Hey Michael
I guess the obvious question here is why do you care about the order? I have never seen anything over on http://www.sitemaps.org that indicated that the order was of any importance and in fact, if you check the FAQ they have this statement.
Q: <a id="faq_url_position" name="faq_url_position"></a>Does position of a URL in a Sitemap influence its use?
No. The position of a URL in the Sitemap is not likely to impact how it is used or regarded by search engines.
So, I would not stress, make sure everything else is right and forget about the order as that seems like a really horrid cut and paste job for a Friday afternoon.
Hope this helps
Marcus
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
-
2015/2016 Sitemaps Exclusions
Hello fellow mozrs!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artdivision
Been working on a few Property (Real Estate for our American friends) websites recently and and two questions that constantly come up as we spec the site are: 1. What schema (schema.org) should the website use (throughout all pages as well as individual pages). Did anyone found that schema actually helped with their ranking/CTR?
2. Whilst setting up the sitemaps (usually Yaost is our preferred plugin for the job), what page would you EXCLUDE from the site map? Looking forward to some interesting comments.
Dan.0 -
XML Site Validators...Any Good Ones?
Before submitting to Google, I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for testing sitemaps out before submitting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
XML Sitemap on another domain
Hi, We've rebuilt our website and created a better sitemap index structure. There's a good chance that we not be able to append the XML files to existing site for technical reasons (don't get me started). I'm reaching out because I'm wondering if can we place the XML files on another website or subdomain? I know this is not best practice and probably very grey but I'm looking for alternatives. If there answer is DON'T DO IT let me know too. Thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Sitemaps
I am working with a site that has sitemaps broken down very specifically. By page type: article, page etc and also broken down by Category. Unfortunately, this is not done hierarchically. Category and page type are separate maps, they are not nested. My question here is: Is is detrimental to have two separate sitemaps that point to the same pages? Should we eliminate one of these taxonomies, or maybe just try to make them hierarchical? IE item type -> category -> pagetitle Is there an issue with having a sitemap index that points to a nested sitemap index? (I dont think so, but might as well be sure. Thanks Moz Community! Can't delete my question, but turns out that isn't how they are structured. Food for thought anyway I suppose.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
How to stop pages being crawled from xml feed?
We have a site that has an xml feed going out to many other sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide
The xml feed is behind a password protected page so cannot use a cannonical link to point back to original url. How do we stop the pages being crawled on all of the sites using the xml feed? as with hundreds using it after launch it will cause instant duplicate content issues? Thanks0 -
How do we get individual products to rank ?
Hi, We have a site that sells music and we have been researching SEO and things we can do to help SERPs. We have started on link building and have added links to the footer of our page We have friendly urls, meta tag description added to all products. My question is, Yes we can work on getting keywords to rank better in google, one of ours being buy cds. But when it comes to individual products these keywords and results are useless if people are searching for a CD by artist or title which most do as they know what they are looking for. How do i get better results for all these unique products ? One or more of our competitors constantly show up in first few results for nearly any CD search by artist or title, yet we cant seem to get anywhere near this type of result ? Thanks Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PressPlayMusic0 -
Limiting URLS in the HTML Sitemap?
So I started making a sitemap for our new golf site, which has quite a few "low level" pages (about 100 for the golf courses that exist in the area, and then about 50 for course architects), etc etc. My question/open discussion is simple. In a sitemap that already has about 50 links, should we include these other low level 150 links? Of course, the link to the "Golf Courses" is there, along with a link to the "Course Architects" MAIN pages (which, subdivides on THOSE pages.) I have read the limit is around 150 links on the sitemap.html page and while it would be nice to rank long tail for the Golf Courses. All in all, our site architecture itself is easily crawlable as well. So the main question is just to include ALL the links or just the main ones? Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO0 -
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 | | rhysmaster0