XML Sitemaps for Search Engine Indexing

We have had a few users request 1 Million page crawler limits or more so I thought this would be a great topic to address in our blog. Whether you are creating a sitemap to improve your search engine optimization or creating it for website project planning purposes, there are size limitations to consider. According to sitemaps.org, the official protocol for XML sitemaps, they should not contain more than 50,000 website URLs and no larger than 10MB in size.   Google, Yahoo, and Bing also follow these same size restrictions of XML sitemaps. If your site's page count is larger than this, you will need to use multiple sitemaps and link them from a sitemap index file which will identify each of the sitemap files for the search engines for more efficient indexing.

Visual Sitemaps for Project Discovery & Planning

Similarly, a gigantic visual sitemap can also be hard to view if the sitemap contains many pages and levels. For these reasons, DYNO Mapper has several options to manage enterprise level websites, so we wanted to show you our process for creating multiple sitemaps. 

A sitemap generator is a specific type of software that can automatically create a list of pages that are contained within a website or online application. Designing a totally new website or redesigning an existing website can be a daunting process, and a sitemap generator can take a significant amount of work off of the shoulders of the webmaster by creating the sitemap in just a few clicks. Sitemap generators can be used right in the browser or some come as programs that are downloaded. Gone are the days of manually creating sitemaps with no other option—though some may still opt to do this. Sitemap generators allow websites of all sizes to quickly and accurately obtain essentially a map of their content and how each piece relates to other pieces so that work can be performed on the website when needed.

As we approach the 25th anniversary of the ADA (American Disabilities Act), DYNO Mapper, an 1871 startup is successfully helping organizations locate, monitor, and fix accessibility and usability issues with their public facing websites.

DECEMBER 7, 2015, CHICAGO. In 1998, the United States Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to strengthen provisions that protect online access to information provided by the Federal government to individuals with disabilities. The law covers every type of electronic and information technology and is not limited to assistive technologies used by people with disabilities. It applies to all Federal agencies when they develop, procure, maintain, or use such technology. The Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards were released on December 21, 2000 and the initial deadline for 508 compliance was June 21, 2001.

In previous articles we’ve talked about content marketing and auditing tools, DYNO Mapper’s Google analytics integration features and how sitemap tools can make your life much easier. We are going to take things a bit further in this article and talk about how analytics and content audits go hand in hand. Most people don’t realize that they can use analytics for content auditing purposes, but by utilizing your analytics data you will have the ability to rise to the top with fantastic content for search engines and visitors.

Regardless of whether you’re a medical office, large e-commerce website or local small to medium sized business, both HTML and XML sitemaps are imperative when it comes to the absolute success of your website. In many ways, a sitemap is a map to your success, a list of pages that can take many forms including an HTML listing of page names, a list of all of the page URL’s, machine-readable XML and so on.

Now, since this article is all about how you can build the ultimate XML sitemap for your website I want to first briefly discuss exactly what an XML is. If you know anything about sitemaps you’re probably aware that two of the most common are HTML and XML. There’s a big difference between the two, however, and it’s recommended for each website to have both types of sitemaps because HTML sitemaps are designed for website visitors whereas XML sitemaps are intended for search engines and spiders.