Gordon's WebLog

UPDATE. SEE ALSO THIS POSTING.

In this posting I gave details of a free site map generator/ which I used for some time and found it excellent.

However, I have now come accross one at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which I believe is far better.

So what can you do with it by logging onto the site ?

Build your Site Map online (XML, ROR, Text, HTML) This website will let you:

Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.

Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.

Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.

Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your website.

It is limited in the number of pages it will crawl, but you can also purchase (and put in a folder on your web site) a paid-up version available here which is NOT limited and has additional configuration features. It is well worth purchasing this version - particularly as it only costs 14.99 US Dollars !

Here is the brief summary of its features:

1. It generates any kind of sitemap you require: XML, Text, HTML site maps.

2. It is developed in PHP languages and works with most web-server's configurations

3. Fast and easy installation onto the same host that should be crawled

4. Flexible configuration that allows you to set any sitemap parameters and crawler settings

5. Support of LARGE websites, dividing the sitemap on the parts per 50,000 URLs each and Sitemap Index file according to the Google sitemap protocol.

6. "robots.txt" exclusion protocol is supported

7. GZip compression supported (optional)

8. User-friendly progress indication for sitemap generation in manual mode

9. Allows to setup the cron job to create sitemaps without a user interaction

10. Informs (ping) Google automatically when sitemap generation is complete

11. Website structure analysis feature represents the tree-like layout of your pages distribution within folders

12. The script collects all generated sitemaps details and provides the log chanages in it, including the number (and the lists) of added and removed pages.

13. The broken links are detected by the application and reported on the special page, providing also the URLs pages that refer to these bad links.

And it give change logs and broken links reports as well.

Give it a try - you will find that it is an excellent srcipt, easy to use (start the crawl and it's all automatic - even to pinging Google) and you will notice that your page ratings increase together with the number of visitors to your site you get.