Tuesday, January 13, 2009
It’s been well over three years since we initially announced the
Python Sitemap generator
in
June 2005.
In this time, we’ve seen lots of people create great
third-party sitemap generators
to help webmasters create better sitemap files. While most sitemap
generators either crawl websites or list the files on a server, we have created a different kind
of sitemap generator that uses several ways to find URLs on your website and then allows you to
automatically create and maintain different kinds of sitemap files.
About Google Sitemap Generator
Our new open-source
Google Sitemap Generator
finds new and modified URLs based on your webserver’s traffic, its log
files, or the files found on the server. By combining these methods, Google Sitemap Generator can
be very fast in finding these URLs and calculating relevant metadata, thereby making your sitemap
files as effective as possible. Once Google Sitemap Generator has collected the URLs, it can
create the following sitemap files for you:
- XML sitemaps for Web Search according to
the sitemaps.org standard - Mobile sitemaps for mobile-friendly websites
- Code Search sitemaps for source code that you make available to users
In addition, Google Sitemap Generator can send a
ping to Google Blog Search
for all of your new or modified URLs. You can optionally include the URLs of the sitemap files in
your robots.txt file as well as “ping” the other search engines that support the
sitemaps.org standard.
Sending the URLs to the right sitemap files is simple thanks to the web-based administration
console. This console gives you access to various features that make administration a piece of
cake while maintaining a high level of security by default.
Getting started
Google Sitemap Generator is a server plug-in that can be installed on both Linux/Apache and
Microsoft IIS Windows-based servers. As with other server-side plug-ins, you will need to have
administrative access to the server to install it. You can find detailed information for the
installation in the
Google Sitemap Generator documentation.
We’re excited to release Google Sitemap Generator with the source code and hope that this will
encourage more web hosters to include this or similar tools in their hosting packages!
Do you have any questions? You can drop by our
Help Group for Google Sitemap Generator
or ask general sitemaps question in our
Webmaster Help Forum.
How we apply this
Google announcements age. We keep this post here for the record, and we note for clients whether the behaviour it describes still applies today or has since been superseded.
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