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.
Is there a way for me to automatically download a website's sitemap.xml every month?
-
From now on we want to store all our sitemap.xml over the next years. Its a nice archive to have that allows us to analyse how many pages we have on our website and which ones were removed/redirected.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
-
If you use a MySQL database to store your website data, I think that to do this kind of automatic "archival" work by creating an automatic PHP script would take between 2 to 5 hours work. I don't see why it should take more than that.
If someone tells you that it is going to take more than that, I would be suspicious. Either the programmer is not good enough, or wants to cheat on you. That unfortunately happens more than you think!!
Be sure to ask for a step-by-step description of how they plan to complete the job. If you have doubts, please feel free to ask me, I am a pretty expert PHP programmer. I don't work for others, but just for myself (I built and keep tweaking my own websites virtualsheetmusic.com, musicianspage.com and others with very little help from external programmers).
Good luck!
-
Hi Fabrizo,
How long would it take for a PHP programmer to write this code approximately? Since we would have to outsource this I would like an indication to oversee costs involved.
Thanks!
-
The way I would do it would be to make a simple PHP (or Perl) program that every day, week or month (as you may need it), archives your sitemap.xml on a specific directory on your server, and possibly zip it. As a PHP programmer myself, I can tell you that that's really simply to do. Just ask to a PHP programmer, I am sure it will make it in a couple hours!
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
-
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
Finding websites that don't have meta descriptions
Hi everyone, as a way to find new business leads I thought about targeting websites that have poor meta descriptions or where they are simply missing. A quick look at SERPs shows this is still a major issue for many businesses. Is there any way I can quickly find pages for which meta description is lacking? Thank you! Best regards, Florian
Technical SEO | | agencepicnic0 -
Good alternatives to Xenu's Link Sleuth and AuditMyPc.com Sitemap Generator
I am working on scraping title tags from websites with 1-5 million pages. Xenu's Link Sleuth seems to be the best option for this, at this point. Sitemap Generator from AuditMyPc.com seems to be working too, but it starts handing up, when a sitemap file, the tools is working on,becomes too large. So basically, the second one looks like it wont be good for websites of this size. I know that Scrapebox can scrape title tags from list of url, but this is not needed, since this comes with both of the above mentioned tools. I know about DeepCrawl.com also, but this one is paid, and it would be very expensive with this amount of pages and websites too (5 million ulrs is $1750 per month, I could get a better deal on multiple websites, but this obvioulsy does not make sense to me, it needs to be free, more or less). Seo Spider from Screaming Frog is not good for large websites. So, in general, what is the best way to work on something like this, also time efficient. Are there any other options for this? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | blrs120 -
301 Redirects Relating to Your XML Sitemap
Lets say you've got a website and it had quite a few pages that for lack of a better term were like an infomercial, 6-8 pages of slightly different topics all essentially saying the same thing. You could all but call it spam. www.site.com/page-1 www.site.com/page-2 www.site.com/page-3 www.site.com/page-4 www.site.com/page-5 www.site.com/page-6 Now you decided to consolidate all of that information into one well written page, and while the previous pages may have been a bit spammy they did indeed have SOME juice to pass through. Your new page is: www.site.com/not-spammy-page You then 301 redirect the previous 'spammy' pages to the new page. Now the question, do I immediately re-submit an updated xml sitemap to Google, which would NOT contain all of the old URL's, thus making me assume Google would miss the 301 redirect/seo juice. Or do I wait a week or two, allow Google to re-crawl the site and see the existing 301's and once they've taken notice of the changes submit an updated sitemap? Probably a stupid question I understand, but I want to ensure I'm following the best practices given the situation, thanks guys and girls!
Technical SEO | | Emory_Peterson0 -
Should each new blog post be added to Sitemap.xml
Hello everyone, I have a website that has only static content. I have recently added a Blog to my website and I am wondering if I need to add each new Blog post to my Sitemap.xml file? Or is there another way/better way to get the Blog posting index? Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | threebiz0 -
Do I need an XML sitemap?
I have an established website that ranks well in Google. However, I have just noticed that no xml sitemap has been registered in Google webmaster tools, so the likelihood is that it hasn't been registered with the other search engines. However, there is an html sitemap listed on the website. Seeing as the website is already ranking well, do I still need to generate and submit an XML sitemap? Could there be any detriment to current rankings in doing so?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
Found a Typo in URL, what's the best practice to fix it?
Wordpress 3.4, Yoast, Multisite The URL is supposed to be "www.myexample.com/great-site" but I just found that it's "www.myexample.com/gre-atsite" It is a relatively new site but we already pointed several internal links to "www.myexample.com/gre-atsite" What's the best practice to correct this? Which option is more desirable? 1.Creating a new page I found that Yoast has "301 redirect" option in the Advanced tap Can I just create a new page(exact same page) and put noindex, nofollow and redirect it to http://www.myexample.com/great-site OR 2. htacess redirect rule simply change the URL to http://www.myexample.com/great-site and update it, and add Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | joony2008
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^http://www.myexample.com/gre-atsite$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.myexample.com/great-site$1 [R=301,L]0 -
Blocking URL's with specific parameters from Googlebot
Hi, I've discovered that Googlebot's are voting on products listed on our website and as a result are creating negative ratings by placing votes from 1 to 5 for every product. The voting function is handled using Javascript, as shown below, and the script prevents multiple votes so most products end up with a vote of 1, which translates to "poor". How do I go about using robots.txt to block a URL with specific parameters only? I'm worried that I might end up blocking the whole product listing, which would result in de-listing from Google and the loss of many highly ranked pages. DON'T want to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?productid=1234 WANT to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?mode=vote&productid=1234&vote=2 Javacript button code: onclick="javascript: document.voteform.submit();" Thanks in advance for any advice given. Regards,
Technical SEO | | aethereal
Asim0