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    4. Best server-side sitemap generators

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    Best server-side sitemap generators

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • RG_SEO
      RG_SEO last edited by

      I've been looking into sitemap generators recently and have got a good knowledge of what creating a sitemap for a small website of below 500 URLs involves. I have successfully generated a sitemap for a very small site, but I’m trying to work out the best way of crawling a large site with millions of URLs.

      I’ve decided that the best way to crawl such a large number of URLs is to use a server side sitemap, but this is an area that doesn’t seem to be covered in detail on SEO blogs / forums. Could anyone recommend a good server side sitemap generator? What do you think of the automated offerings from Google and Bing? I’ve found a list of server side sitemap generators from Google, but I can’t see any way to choose between them. I realise that a lot will depend on the type of technologies we use server side, but I'm afraid that I don't know them at this time.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • ChristopherGlaeser
        ChristopherGlaeser @FedeEinhorn last edited by

        Unless they have fixed it in recent months, xml-sitemaps does not generate correct video sitemaps.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • FedeEinhorn
          FedeEinhorn @RG_SEO last edited by

          Yeah, they offer free and paid hosted versions too. But I found the server side version much simpler to setup and control.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Elchanan
            Elchanan Subscriber last edited by

            Try this:

            http://sourceforge.net/projects/goog-sitemapgen/files/sitemapgen/

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • RG_SEO
              RG_SEO @FedeEinhorn last edited by

              Excellent advice Federico. My first reaction was, "but that's not a server-side sitemap generator". I just looked at their website though and it turns out that it is! Looks like I need to read things more carefully!

              I'll look into that as an option but if anyone else has any server side sitemap generators that they'd recommend then I'd be really interested to hear about them 🙂

              FedeEinhorn 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • FedeEinhorn
                FedeEinhorn last edited by

                I have been using xml-sitemaps (paid version) for all my sites over 5 years and they work like a charm, scraping and indexing what it needs to be indexed ans scraped, plus it consumes really low resources. 100% recommended (they have nice plugins too for extra sitempas (video, news, images, etc).

                Hope that helps!

                RG_SEO ChristopherGlaeser 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
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