- You want Google to crawl more of your web pages.
- You want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes.
This article explores the options around this new Google experiment.
Developers are a frantic bunch at the best of times but the release of a new Google service offering like this one really gets them agitated. For the intrepid blogger or webmaster keen to create a sitemap there are already a number of wizard and generator options available.
You can install and execute the official Google Sitemap Generator on your web server. This requires some configuration, specific server requirements and preferably the ability to run cron jobs if you are on a unix server. I didn't select this option mainly because I wanted to quickly generate a sitemap to test the service and also because my web host doesn't allow cron jobs. I'd need to find a different scripting option to take advantage of the recurring script functions (eg. generate a new sitemap and notify Google every time you change the content on your site)
Considering Google only released sitemaps on June 2nd there is an incredible number of options already available for small software applications and wizards helping generate sitemaps. Of course because it is the wild west early days of testing for the programs there is a wide variety of stability and quality out there.
- I tried a couple of web-based options, here, here, and here, but none of them worked for me, indexing only a fraction of the pages on my www.chrisbrauer.com site in the generated sitemaps;
- If you are into ASP (which I am not) you might want to try out this ASP sitemap generator;
- If you have a weblog powered by Blogger you can use this hack to get your blogger template preview to generate a sitemap. I didn't choose this option because I want my sitemap to reflect all the content on my site (gallery, blog postings, basic html pages, etc);
- There is a Windows-based option apparently coming soon at this site;
- This Perl sitemap generator is just some raw code that hasn't been thoroughly tested but pick your poison;
- And finally the option I chose to use, this PHP Generator from Tobias. I installed it on my web server, changed the permissions on the files (666 for sitemap.xml and 775 for phpsitemap.php), and ran the script. I picked the directories and file types I wanted to exclude from the sitemap output and it generated a script that was subsequently submitted to Google through the script. I followed up at Google and submitted my sitemap.xml file myself. This is useful as you can track status (my submission is currently pending);
There are bound to be many more options available to generate sitemaps so I will try for this initial period of this release to keep this list updated. Send me an email at blog at chrisbrauer.com if you know of other available options and I will add them to the list. Otherwise it is useful to keep your eye on Google groups for the latest discussions on sitemaps.
Obviously my initial submission is a test to see how Google handles my sitemap file but in the future it would be useful to find a solution that automatically handles all the necessary script generation and Google notifications each time my site is updated. It's exciting that there might be a straightforward way of ensuring Google indexes all of your content on a timetable of your choosing.
For more recent Chris Brauer Media Project WWW tips see New Media Notes or Blogger/Blogkomm
Labels: internet
