How to create site map for large site (ecommerce type) that has 1000's if not 100,000 of pages.
-
I know this is kind of a newbie question but I am having an amazing amount of trouble creating a sitemap for our site Bestride.com. We just did a complete redesign (look and feel, functionality, the works) and now I am trying to create a site map. Most of the generators I have used "break" after reaching some number of pages. I am at a loss as to how to create the sitemap. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
-
I agree with Chris. With such large websites it would be advisable having a sitemap index and then splitting the index into various individual indexes such as Pages, Products, Categories, images, media, tags etc.
-
The easiest thing i can think of is to write a script that works with your dispatcher to create a site map. The format I would use is add the page and all of the "product images" on the page to the map and move to the next. At the same time I would use an auto increment variable to keep track of how many lines you have written. When you get around 50k, write out the name of the next site map file that the program will create and have them chained together this way.
-
That's a great help Chris, thank you! And thanks to all for your help!
-
Typically, a sitemap is going to include every page on the site. As Francesca said, each sitemap can be up to 50K urls and if you need multiple sitemaps then you create a sitemap index that points to the rest of the sitemaps.
-
Thanks for the feedback!
I will look into screamingfrog for sure.
@Lesley - we are using a custom platform (in house) so we don't have that functionality. The issue is that we have a lot of inventory (millions) of cars. We have built (and are releasing new functionality today) to provide internal links so that Google can crawl all the inventory easily (users can too :). My question about sitemaps has boiled down to this: Do we need to build the sitemap to include every single page (all the inventory) or do we provide a "map" so that google can find the top pages and then crawl the inventory from there. Again the site is bestride.com. If anyone wants to take a look at the site, that would be fantastic!
Thanks
-
Are you using a custom platform or an off the shelf e-commerce package? Most off the shelf packages actually have a module that can create a site map and a lot have it where you can cron it too.
-
Of course, you can also use the moz's crawl test report at http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test
-
Hi Kristin,
Each sitemap.xml can support maximum 50.000 URLs. So, If you have a site with more than 100K, It'd be better to create 2 or 3 o 4 etc sitemaps.xml in order to contain all URLs. Hope it is useful.
Kind regards!
Francesca
-
You can use screamingfrog to create your sitemap. You just need to license it for crawl more than 500 URI.
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
-
Sitemap use for very large forum-based community site
I work on a very large site with two main types of content, static landing pages for products, and a forum & blogs (user created) under each product. Site has maybe 500k - 1 million pages. We do not have a sitemap at this time.
Technical SEO | | CommManager
Currently our SEO discoverability in general is good, Google is indexing new forum threads within 1-5 days roughly. Some of the "static" landing pages for our smaller, less visited products however do not have great SEO.
Question is, could our SEO be improved by creating a sitemap, and if so, how could it be implemented? I see a few ways to go about it: Sitemap includes "static" product category landing pages only - i.e., the product home pages, the forum landing pages, and blog list pages. This would probably end up being 100-200 URLs. Sitemap contains the above but is also dynamically updated with new threads & blog posts. Option 2 seems like it would mean the sitemap is unmanageably long (hundreds of thousands of forum URLs). Would a crawler even parse something that size? Or with Option 1, could it cause our organically ranked pages to change ranking due to Google re-prioritizing the pages within the sitemap?
Not a lot of information out there on this topic, appreciate any input. Thanks in advance.0 -
Sub domain? Micro site? What's the best solution?
My client currently has two websites to promote their art galleries in different parts of the country. They have bought a new domain (let's call it buyart.com) which they would eventually like to use as an e-commerce platform. They are wondering whether they keep their existing two gallery websites (non e-commerce) separate as they always have been, or somehow combine these into the new domain and have one overarching brand (buyart.com). I've read a bit on subdomains and microsites but am unsure at this stage what the best option would be, and what the pros and cons are. My feeling is to bring it all together under buyart.com so everything is in one place and creates a better user journey for anyone who would like to visit. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | WhitewallGlasgow0 -
Paypal instead of Merchant's account and will the site still move up?
Hello, Will an Ecommerce site still move up in a niche if it only accepts PayPal and doesn't have a merchant's account on it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
How can i do SEO For Ecommerce site
I am doing SEO for my WP blog but now I am starting my recently launch an eCommerce site where I am selling electronics products. I want to know how can I do the SEO so at least I can top 10 position for my google India. Second how can i avoid duplicate content about copying manufacture contents. Please help
Technical SEO | | chandubaba0 -
What's the correct SEO for a Gallery?
Hi there, I was wondering if anyone was an expert on galleries and using canonical URL's? URL: http://www.tecsew.com/gallery In short I'm doing SEO for a site and it has a large gallery (3000+ images) where each specific image has it's own page and each category (there's 200+) also has its own page. Now, what I'm thinking is that this should be reduced and asking Google to index/rank each page is wrong (I also think this because the quality of the pages are relatively low i.e little text & content etc) Therefore, what should be suggested/done to the gallery? Should just the main gallery categories get indexed (i.e http://www.tecsew.com/3d-cad-showcase)? Or should I continue to allow Google to trawl through all of it? Or should canonical URL's be used? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Best Wishes, Charlie S
Technical SEO | | media.street0 -
Mega Menus - Site Links - Bottom of the Page
Here are the questions: If you replace your top menu with a mega menu - like rei.com, target.com etc - that has dramatically more links and lots of non-optimized testimonials and calls for action, and locate the actual code of the mega menu at the bottom of the HTML , How will this affect your sitelinks? Will this now, make your on-page content more visible and indexable? Or does the Google bott dismiss this as just navigation content? In the past, I've have seen this technique work well, but that was before site links were easier to obtain. Looking at sites with virtually no navigation on their home pages and good authority, I've seen site links seemingly gleamed from alt attributes.
Technical SEO | | Runner20090 -
What's the max number of links you should ever have on a page?
Our homepage has a few hundred links and our index pages(pages that link to our spintext pages) have about 900 links on them with no content. Our SEO guy said we have to keep the links under 1000 but I wanted to see what you guys think.
Technical SEO | | upper2bits0 -
From your perspective, what's wrong with this site such that it has a Panda Penalty?
www.duhaime.org For more background, please see: http://www.seomoz.org/q/advice-regarding-panda http://www.seomoz.org/q/when-panda-s-attack (hoping the third time's the charm here)
Technical SEO | | sprynewmedia0