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 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.a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/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.
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
-
disavow link more than 100,000 lines
I recieved a huge amount of spamy link (most of them has spam score 100) Currently my disavow link is arround 85.000 lines but at least i have 100.000 more domain which i should add them. All of them are domains and i don't have any backlink in my file. My Problem is that google dosen't accept disavow link which are more than 2MB and showes this message : File too big: Maximum file size is 100,000 lines and 2MB What should i do now?
Technical SEO | | sforoughi0 -
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 -
Why Can't Googlebot Fetch Its Own Map on Our Site?
I created a custom map using google maps creator and I embedded it on our site. However, when I ran the fetch and render through Search Console, it said it was blocked by our robots.txt file. I read in the Search Console Help section that: 'For resources blocked by robots.txt files that you don't own, reach out to the resource site owners and ask them to unblock those resources to Googlebot." I did not setup our robtos.txt file. However, I can't imagine it would be setup to block google from crawling a map. i will look into that, but before I go messing with it (since I'm not familiar with it) does google automatically block their maps from their own googlebot? Has anyone encountered this before? Here is what the robot.txt file says in Search Console: User-agent: * Allow: /maps/api/js? Allow: /maps/api/js/DirectionsService.Route Allow: /maps/api/js/DistanceMatrixService.GetDistanceMatrix Allow: /maps/api/js/ElevationService.GetElevationForLine Allow: /maps/api/js/GeocodeService.Search Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetFeature Allow: /maps/api/js/KmlOverlayService.GetOverlays Allow: /maps/api/js/LayersService.GetFeature Disallow: / Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Removing a large number of unnecessary pages from a site
Hi all, I got a big problem with my website. I have a lot of page, duplicate page made from various combinations of selects, and for all this duplicate content we've be hit by a panda update 2 years ago. I don't want to bring new content an all of these pages, about 3.000.000, because most of them are unnecessary. Google indexed all of them (3.000.000), and I want to redirect the pages that I don't need anymore to the most important ones. My question, is there any problem in how google will see this change, because after this it will remain only 5000-6000 relevant pages?
Technical SEO | | Silviu0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Volusion eCommerce Site 302s and Canonicalization
There have been a couple other threads concerning this topic so I apologize, but I have an iteration on the main question that has not been answered. Crawl Diagnostics is giving me a bunch of 302 temporary redirect notices. For example, here is a page title URL:
Technical SEO | | anneoaks
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/0073380.htm and here is the redirect:
http://store.in-situ.com/Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htm?1=1&CartID=0 The first link is actually a child product of:
http://store.in-situ.com//Rugged-Conductivity-Meter-p/tape-clt-meter.htm Volusion tech support told me they believe most of them are meta redirects but could not find any documentation on them. All the other threads concerning this have said to either change the 302s to 301s, which I don't think is possible, or to add a nofollow tag. My question is do I need to do anything if both those pages are canonical to the parent product? Should I be passing on the linkjuice if neither of those pages are of high value?0 -
ECommerce: Best Practice for expired product pages
I'm optimizing a pet supplies site (http://www.qualipet.ch/) and have a question about the best practice for expired product pages. We have thousands of products and hundreds of our offers just exist for a few months. Currently, when a product is no longer available, the site just returns a 404. Now I'm wondering what a better solution could be: 1. When a product disappears, a 301 redirect is established to the category page it in (i.e. leash would redirect to dog accessories). 2. After a product disappers, a customized 404 page appears, listing similar products (but the server returns a 404) I prefer solution 1, but am afraid that having hundreds of new redirects each month might look strange. But then again, returning lots of 404s to search engines is also not the best option. Do you know the best practice for large ecommerce sites where they have hundreds or even thousands of products that appear/disappear on a frequent basis? What should be done with those obsolete URLs?
Technical SEO | | zeepartner1 -
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?
Technical SEO | | SystemIDBarcodes0