It took a while --{ busy with other projects, sorry }-- but finally
freesitemapgenerator.com has moved to https.
Your bits and bytes will now be encrypted
between your browser and our servers.
The free SSL
server test at SSL Labs checked the installation and
gave our web servers an "A"! All traffic to
http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/ is now redirected to
https://freesitemapgenerator.com/.
This should be very transparent to the Free Sitemap
Generator users but if you see strange behavior please
let us know.
As we promised earlier this year, we will keep track of the Google SERPs, Indexed Pages and all other kind of metrics. We expect to see a little rise in the SERPs because Google announced to reward https websites. You, as a fellow webmaster, will probably be interested in the results. We will give the internets a couple of weeks to settle and then we will compare data and report back to you. With the Let's Encrypt program being released later this year it will be easier than ever to migrate to https.
The magic Apache configuration I used to enable this redirect:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) https://freesitemapgenerator.com$1 [R=301]
If you have installed our upload script to get new sitemaps uploaded to your website, you might have encountered some problems with larger sitemaps. Hosting providers have set different maximum upload sizes and sometimes the sitemaps were just to large to be uploaded in one call.
To overcome this problem we have extended the upload script to upload a sitemap.xml in batches of 1MB.
If you have a small site (and a small sitemap) no action is required: you can keep using the existing upload script.
If you have already seen errors in the upload process or have a growing site and a growing sitemap: install the version 3.0.0 of the upload script as soon as possible. To (re-)install the upload script, Log in and in the control panel scroll down and look for the "Install 'Auto Upload' package" form. Select the website and click on Install. And as always, your feedback is appreciated.
We have added a redirection detector when you add a new website to your account. In the past we have had some questions from users who created a new account and added a site like http://freesitemapgenerator.com/. This website was actually a redirect to https://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/ and our spider sees this as two different websites. The sitemap for freesitemapgenerator.com would then be empty: all links to https://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/ are considered to be external links.
If you now add a new website we will fetch the homepage automatically and see if it this is a redirect. If it is we will follow the redirect and store the new url in our database. In the use case mentioned above, the URL stored in our database would have been https://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/ and we think that is exactly what this user was requesting.
This feature will not affect existing entries: the filter is applied only when adding a new account or new site. Your feedback is, as always, highly appreciated and will help us to improve our ability to serve you and other users of our web sites.
FreeSitemapGenerator is always looking for ways to improve our own and your rankings. Lately we have received multiple reports that state we should move our site to HTTPS. According to Google HTTPS will be used as a minor ranking signal. Google:
For now it's only a very lightweight signal affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we.d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.
from: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ 2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
We are now gathering metrics of freesitemapgenerator.com and will move to HTTPS later this month. We will report back to you with updated metrics and see if it is worth to move to HTTPS. If you have moved a site to HTTPS and want to share the results with us and/or the entire FreeSitemapGenerator.com community get in touch!
FreeSitemapGenerator can create sitemaps for HTTPS websites since 2014.
FreeSitemapGenerator supports video sitemaps. If your website contains videos hosted by youtube.com or vimeo.com we will find them and put them in your sitemap.
Check our example sitemap to see thie <video:video> tag. (you have to scroll down a bit)
See the Google Video Sitemap page for more details. This new feature is enabled by default.
It was time to get a new look. What do you think? Feedback is always appreciated!
You can see our 'old' look and feel in the previous news item...
If you have a lot of websites listed in your control panel, it can be hard to find the website you want to
update or check. We have added screenshots in the left column of all your websites.
We think it is cool. Let us know what you think.
This service is now also available for https websites. Let us know if you encounter any problems. You can use free sitemap generator to generate a sitemap.xml for your https website.
