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:
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? Feel free to drop by our
Help Group for Google Sitemap Generator or ask general Sitemaps question in our
Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich
