I've been away for awhile but that does not mean that I have not been thinking about you. Every day in fact and to prove it I came back with a new tool: the Sitemap Manager.
Ever thought about getting your site on top of all those Google, Yahoo or Bing search results? And then you realized that to get the pages up there you need to somehow convince the search engines that you exist? Well, if this is your problem then the solution is creating an XML Sitemap for your site and the ultimate tool to generate and maintain an XML Sitemap is Sitemap Manager.
Let's start with the basic Sitemap Manager features:
- it can crawl a site
- it can generate an XML Sitemap. So far nothing special but read on for the real improvements sin sitemap generation.
- it can manipulate your sitemap with its own special Maintenance Rules.
- it can upload the sitemap to an FTP location.
- it even has an XML Sitemap validator.
The Maintenance Rules deserve a little extra explaining. I'll start with an example. Let's say you generated your sitemap but you realize that all is well "except this or that should be adjusted". This is where the Sitemap Manager really shines. It allows you to define these Maintenance Rules where you say stuff like "if the URL has the word forum in it then remove it from the sitemap" or "if the URL is the monthly feature page then increase the priority in the sitemap". Once defined the Maintenance Rules are applied automatically every time you re-generate the sitemap making sitemap maintenance completely automatic.
But what can a maintenance rule do? I'm glad you asked...
The maintenance rules can modify any aspect of the sitemap URL such as priority, inclusion, date changed and change frequency given some easy to define targets. A target can be a URL, a content type and even a referrer. There is even a library of commonly used rules such as excluding all binaries.
The Sitemap Manager also comes with an advanced XML Sitemap Validator. This not only confirms compliance with the XML Sitemap schemas but also verifies common mistakes found in XML Sitemaps. The advanced validator checks for:
- Makes sure the XML is UTF8 encoded
- Confirms that not all URLs have the same priority
- Makes sure that all URLs are under the XML Sitemap URL.
- lots of other checks I did not have time to discover
You can find more details on the Sitemap Manager home: http://www.sitemaphub.com/Sitemap-Manager/
The Sitemap Manager is free to try for 30 days without any restrictions. A full license costs $49.99 USD.
