Sunday, December 16, 2007

Free Google Sitemap Generator Software(Based on Windows)


Have you ever tried the sitemap genertor that provided by google? I have tried it today. But I found it was very hard to use. It needs a lot of requirments, just as following:

The Google Sitemap Generator is a Python script that creates a Sitemap for your site using the Sitemap Protocol. This script can create Sitemaps from URL lists, web server directories, or from access logs. In order to use this script:

You must be able to connect to and run scripts on your web server.

Your web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed.

You must know the command that launches Python. (Generally, this is python, but may vary by installation. For instance, if the web server has two versions of Python installed, the earlier version may be invoked by the command python and the later version may be invoked by the command python2.)

You must know the directory path to your site. If your web server hosts one site, this may be a path such as var/www/html. If you have a virtual server that hosts multiple sites, this may be a path such as home/virtual/site1/fst/var/www/html.

You must be able to upload files to your web server (for instance, using FTP).

If you will be generating a list of URLs based on access logs, you must know the encoding used for those logs and the complete path to them.

If you aren't sure about any of this, you can check with your web hosting company.


I don't think all the host company provides such kind of service. So I think I can generate the sitemap on my local computer and then upload to the server. May be you have the same idea with me. I installed the Python on my local computer and run the sitemap_gen.py. It has a lot of configuration to make, I have tried many times to make it correct. But no success results, seems it can not crawl the target site automatically. It always generate only one url(the target url) in the sitemap.xml. What's your experience? Maybe it is not a good tool for some webmasters(just as me).

There are many online free sitemap generators. Most of them are free for sites that have lower than 5,000 links. They are good enough for small websites. But if you have a site that has more than 10,000 links, what will you do? To use their payed service? I don't think this is a good choice for some websites with a little investment.

I searched on google and found a good free software - VIGOS Gsitemap . VIGOS Gsitemap is a 100% FREE, easy-to-use but versatile Windows sitemap generator tool to help webmasters and website owners to create, edit and submit sitemap information in adherence to the Google Sitemaps protocol.

It's a good tool for generating google sitemap. But I suggest the author to improve one thing, when the user clicks the shut button, it should pop up a warning window to let the user to ensure shut down. I have shutted the soft two times by mistake while it was running. All the crawled data were lost every time, I had to start from zero. It took a lot of time. If it has the warning function when shut down, it will be helpful.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi. Thanks for article. I use for my websites XML sitemap generator. It works and it works well! Mayor search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Moreover) are able to index and read your sitemaps without any problems.