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 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?
-
Thanks Saijo,
We are trying to silo product types/categories and break them into different sitemaps. I'm familiar with SF but I don't think it will create sitemaps with the granularity that we are looking for.
I'm using XMLSpy but I'm finding it hard to break out blocks of content.
-
To my knowledge, Screaming Frog doesn't allow you to create an XML sitemap. Perhaps Excel allows you to format the output from SF but I'm not sure. I did find a utility called XMLSpy which, though pricey, allows me to do some of the sorting I was looking for. Once sorted, I can manually pull out sections to segment my sitemap. It is a pain in the neck because I can determine a silo and do it automatically. That being said, I think I can develop a sitemap template and have our new web programmer to develop a way to auto generate a group of segmented sitemaps.
Anyone know if there is a canned solution that works with IIS?
-
If you site is structured such that the urls contain the categories you wish to sort , you can use something like Screaming Frog ( http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ ) and export all the urls and sort them out via excel in to categories and go that way
NOTE : the free version has a 500 url limit, so you might want to look at paid ( ask them if it can handle 17,00 urls before getting it ) or look at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html ( I haven't used it myself , so don't know if you can export stuff to excel from there )
Good luck mate , sounds like you have a big job ahead of you.
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
-
Should I Focus on Video Schema or a Video Sitemap First
Hey all, I'm working on a website that is soon going to launch a video hub that contains over 500 videos. I'm interested in ensuring that the videos show up on the SERPs page in the highest position possible. I know Google recommends that you have on-page schema for your videos as well as an XML sitemap so they can be indexed for SERP. When I look at schema and the XML video sitemap they seem to communicate very similar kinds of information (Title, Description, Thumbnail, Duration). I'm not sure which one to start with; is it more important to have video schema or a video sitemap? Additionally, if anyone knows of any good video sitemap generators (free is best, but cheap is okay too) then please let me know. Cursory google searching has just churned up a number of tools that look sketchy.
Technical SEO | | perfectsearch710 -
Is it important to include image files in your sitemap?
I run an ecommerce business that has over 4000 product pages which, as you can imagine, branches off into thousands of image files. Is it necessary to include those in my sitemap for faster indexing? Thanks for you help! -Reed
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Robots.txt and Multiple Sitemaps
Hello, I have a hopefully simple question but I wanted to ask to get a "second opinion" on what to do in this situation. I am working on a clients robots.txt and we have multiple sitemaps. Using yoast I have my sitemap_index.xml and I also have a sitemap-image.xml I do put them in google and bing by hand but wanted to have it added into the robots.txt for insurance. So my question is, when having multiple sitemaps called out on a robots.txt file does it matter if one is before the other? From my reading it looks like you can have multiple sitemaps called out, but I wasn't sure the best practice when writing it up in the file. Example: User-agent: * Disallow: Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap_index.xml Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap-image.xml Thanks a ton for the feedback, I really appreciate it! :) J
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
302 redirect used, submit old sitemap?
The website of a partner of mine was recently migrated to a new platform. Even though the content on the pages mostly stayed the same, both the HTML source (divs, meta data, headers, etc.) and URLs (removed index.php, removed capitalization, etc) changed heavily. Unfortunately, the URLs of ALL forum posts (150K+) were redirected using a 302 redirect, which was only recently discovered and swiftly changed to a 301 after the discovery. Several other important content pages (150+) weren't redirected at all at first, but most now have a 301 redirect as well. The 302 redirects and 404 content pages had been live for over 2 weeks at that point, and judging by the consistent day/day drop in organic traffic, I'm guessing Google didn't like the way this migration went. My best guess would be that Google is currently treating all these content pages as 'new' (after all, the source code changed 50%+, most of the meta data changed, the URL changed, and a 302 redirect was used). On top of that, the large number of 404's they've encountered (40K+) probably also fueled their belief of a now non-worthy-of-traffic website. Given that some of these pages had been online for almost a decade, I would love Google to see that these pages are actually new versions of the old page, and therefore pass on any link juice & authority. I had the idea of submitting a sitemap containing the most important URLs of the old website (as harvested from the Top Visited Pages from Google Analytics, because no old sitemap was ever generated...), thereby re-pointing Google to all these old pages, but presenting them with a nice 301 redirect this time instead, hopefully causing them to regain their rankings. To your best knowledge, would that help the problems I've outlined above? Could it hurt? Any other tips are welcome as well.
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL0 -
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
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0 -
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
Technical SEO | | BestRide0 -
Will an XML sitemap override a robots.txt
I have a client that has a robots.txt file that is blocking an entire subdomain, entirely by accident. Their original solution, not realizing the robots.txt error, was to submit an xml sitemap to get their pages indexed. I did not think this tactic would work, as the robots.txt would take precedent over the xmls sitemap. But it worked... I have no explanation as to how or why. Does anyone have an answer to this? or any experience with a website that has had a clear Disallow: / for months , that somehow has pages in the index?
Technical SEO | | KCBackofen0
