I've created a small website that generates a Google sitemap for a given website. It's still in development, but I'd like to here your reviews/suggestions/remarks/complaints. Just ignore the layout - that's also under construction, I'm more interested in feedback on functionallity and user friendlyness et cetera. url: http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/ thanks in advance for your time, frankm
frankm, Just tried your website and the tool seems pretty easy to use. The activation emails came through quickly. My site doesn't have that many pages so the finished sitemap came through quickly. Maybe an option for "changefreq" would be good as well. The only other thing that concerned me is that during the activation process when I clicked on the link in the email, the page it took me to showed not only my user name but my password as well. It's a concern that the passwords might not be protected. As I make changes to my site, I'll use the tool again and let you know if I seen any thing else. Tim
frankm, Just noticed that the lastmod date is showing "2005-07-19" and given that I just made a bunch of changes today (11/19/2005) the date seems incorrect. Tim
Thanks for the feedback weboutloud! Yeah, have thinking about that, but not quiet sure how to 'determin' this. You, the webmaster, are the only that really know how often a page change. I'll think about it some more Old debug information has been removed, thanks thanks, really appreciated!
Google sitemaps use iso8601 time format (don't know why, it's a stupid format) so I translate the Date: XXXX header from the url to a unix timestamp, and then convert that to a ISO8601 time string. so far the plan sounds good checked it and fixed the issue. frankm
Just added the <priority> tag to the sitemaps. Priority is calculated based on the linking structure of your website. Well linked pages --> 1.00 just one link on a very page very very far away from the homepage --> 0.00001
takes some time for creating the sitemap, the result looks nice though, just uploaded it to my rootdirectory. lets see what google makes out of it
Thanks vulcano! work still in progress * the tool actually spiders your whole site, so that can take a while if you have 1000s of pages. * I don't want to use all bandwidth + resources for this site on that machine, so it is limited to 1 url per second. I've just added an auto-upload-new-sitemap-to-my-own-site thingie. you can either upload it by hitting a button or having it upload automatically as soon as the sitemap is finnished. Next stop will be auto-ping-google-when-sitemap-has-been-uploaded feature. thanks for the feedback!
Thanks holdemcharts, I like to get feedback on that site. Most people are just anonymous users, they come and they go. We've added some new features : * check indexed pages (google api) to see if a sitemap really helps * show all errors (404 not found and stuff like that) so you can fix it * increased capacity to faster serve all requests. if you're using this tool, let me know what you think or what you find missing, all feedback is welcome
I'm trying it too. Anything to avoid doing my own work. I appreciate the effort. It's been running 2 hours and 45 mins, 8% complete.
remember: it has to crawl your entire site to create a sitemap.. If your site is big (1000+ pages) it can take a while ... last couple of days has been extremely busy so resources have to be shared by a lot of sites/users and besides that we don't want to flood your site with our requests I hope the end result will be worth the wait!
Just cosmetic but the body is a little wider than the header image. The text on the home page lays over the trademark statement in the footer making it hard to read. (In firefox anyway)