I have some static sites where I choose to manually create sitemap files. Here’s how I do it…
First, I create a text file (I use TextPad but pretty much any basic text editor should do the trick).. and I save the file as “sitemap.xml”. In sitemap.xml I have lines of code such as:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://domain.com/</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://domain.com/category1/article1/</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://domain.com/category1/article2/</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
Just keep adding ‘url’ blocks like shown above for each and every page on the site.
Next I compress the file into a file called “sitemap.xml.gz”. I use this 7-zip tool to create the gz file. After installing 7-zip it created an option in my context menu (right-click menu) on my Windows Vista machine. So, I right-click the original “sitemap.xml” file, click “7-zip”, then click “Add to archive…”.
Then I choose “GZip” as the “Archive format” and make sure “Add and replace files” is selected under “Update mode:” which I believe it is by default. Then I click “OK” and it will create (or overwrite) the gz file.
Now.. it doesn’t hurt to create a “urllist.txt” file as well, which is simply the list of URLs on your site, kinda like this (but without the extra line break):
http://domain.com/
http://domain.com/category1/article1/
http://domain.com/category1/article2/
…and so on
Now.. upload the files to the root of your site. You can now submit the xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools if you want. You can then wait for the other engines to pick up whichever file they need… or better yet, use Traffic-Bug to tell all 130+ search engines right now where your site is and they will look at the appropriate sitemap file for indexing.
June 10, 2010
Miscellaneous