Updates about the generator, our spider and sitemaps.
Eleven years after our last new look, freesitemapgenerator.com got a redesign. The blue bar and the familiar layout are still there, but everything is cleaner, easier to read and works on your phone. What is new: Every…
Besides search engines, a new kind of visitor reads your website these days: crawlers that collect text for AI models and AI assistants. Like search engine spiders, they announce themselves with a name, and like search…
You can submit your sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, but there is an easier way that works for every search engine at once: one line in your robots.txt. Sitemap:…
At the end of June Google announced that it is retiring its sitemap ping: the address you could call to tell Google that your sitemap had changed. Google says most of the pings it received were spam, and the ping will…
Last October Microsoft Bing and Yandex introduced IndexNow, a simple way for websites to tell search engines that a page was added, changed or deleted. Instead of waiting for a crawler to notice, your site sends the…
You submitted your sitemap in Google Search Console, and instead of a green "Success" you see an error. These are the ones we get asked about most. Couldn't fetch. Google could not download the sitemap. Open its address…
A question we get every now and then: is there a maximum size for a sitemap? There is. One sitemap file can hold at most 50,000 URLs and may be at most 50 MB before compression. The size limit used to be 10 MB; Google,…
Our spider finds your pages the way a search engine does: it starts at your homepage and follows the links it finds. A page that is missing from your sitemap is almost always a page the spider could not reach, or was…
In March Google started moving websites to mobile-first indexing: it now looks at the mobile version of your pages to decide what they are about and how they rank. Most people search on their phone, and Google wants its…
Since Chrome 56 came out in January, Chrome marks pages with a password or credit card field "Not secure" when they are served over plain http, and Google has said it will eventually do this for all http pages. No…
Last year Google renamed Webmaster Tools to Search Console. The name changed, but it is still the place to tell Google about your sitemap and to see what Google thinks of your site. A quick walk-through: Sign in at…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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.
A lot of discussion lately about net neutrality and transparency. Check out this tool to find out if your ISP is blocking websites.
Freesitemapgenerator.com user Bruce suggested to us to include PDF files in our generated sitemaps. We did some research and found that Google says all valid URLs you want to be spidered should be listed in your…
Last month we posted an article on a generated sitemap for a very large site (125,000 pages per subdomain), Read more. Now a month (almost) has passed, and we are ready to publish the first results. See the image with…
We have received a couple of (10+) e-mails over the last few months from (potential) users of freesitemapgenerator.com with more or less the same question: Should I create a sitemap for my site? Google says you should -…
We have been recommended and awarded as a top ranked Site Map Generator by leading cheap web hosting guide WHS! We have received e-mails from users with compliments - thank you - but we have never received an award and…
We have added an IDN to Punycode converter. If you want to add a site to freesitemapgenerator.com with an international domain name like 'löl.org' you can use this page to convert it to punycode ('xn--ll-fka.org'). We…
Thanks to a bug report from Carl, we could solve an issue with the xml2html script. Issue: If you used a sitemap (created by freesitemapgenerator.com or any other sitemap.xml) that has no <priority> tags, an empty…
Google has a nice feature for webmasters: you can see howmany pages Googlebot has read from your site. We got this screenshot from one of our users who started using freesitemapgenerator.com recently and saw some…
If you had problems getting your site verified by our spider using the second option (link on page) we have solved one reported bug: * If your homepage is a redirect to another page, which contains the link your site…
What about Bing.com? All this time this site has been talking about "Google Sitemaps" but the generated sitemaps are compatible with bing.com-sitemaps too. A new checkbox for all your sites: auto-ping-bing to send bing…
Title says it all! Welcome in the 21th century ... How long will it take us to get a twitter account?
Users with Blogs, flash or other websites that they cannot control completely reported issues with getting their site validated by our spider. We need to be sure the URL(s) you enter are yours so our spiders will only…
We used to use the Google SOAP API using your API-key for the 'Indexed Pages' feature in the control pannel. Google now has deprecated the SOAP API. Thanks to all for the e-mails about this, and to our developers for…
Our forum has been removed. Very sad because some of you gave some nice tips and helped out others, but we were flooded by p*n*s enlargement sites and n*ke shoes... Maybe the forum, or something like it, will return in…
We have installed 2 new servers, one for our premium members and one for our free users. You will notice that the queue is almost gone and your sitemaps will be generated much faster!
More Hardware for FreeSitemapGenerator.com! This week we have installed two new servers for freesitemapgenerator.com and after some serious testing, these servers are now up and running! Sitemaps will be generated…
Do you have a site at blogger? And you use freesitemapgenerator.com to generate Google™ sitemaps for you? Please read this post on the forum and help some fellow users!
Spider update: thanks to a bug-report we got from Luciano (many thanks) we fixed a bug in the Free Sitemap Generator spider. The <BASE HREF="..."> tag was not parsed correctly. If your site is using this tag and your…
We host a couple of sites that got Googlebot's attention for some reason. Yesterday it fetched 22,388 pages and today 42,933. That's a good thing I guess: to be found, you must be spidered first. But this is taken a lot…
The spider/crawler has been upgraded. It now supports gzip and deflate compressed content. This can save bandwidth use on both sides. Check this forum post for more information.
We have introduced a brand new feature: Auto Queue. This option allows you to select the sites you want to have fresh sitemaps generated every 14 ~ 21 days automatically. In combination with the Auto Upload package,…
Live Data package update: new version is 0.96. If you are running version 0.94 or 0.95 you don't HAVE to upgrade now, but the new version is faster and more accurate. If you are running version 0.93 or earlier, you must…
Four days without news. That's not good - we used to post news every day ... But at this time we really haven't any. At this time we have implemented everything we could and have no new ideas. If you have any, please…
To speed up the generating process and have better <priority> tags, we have added what we have named Live Data package. Install it now on your site, just some lines of HTML and JavaScript to copy and paste.
For some sites the generated sitemap only contains one URL. There can be many reasons for this so we created a new button on the control panel: Test. It will fetch your homepage and shows you the links we can see on it.…
After uploading a sitemap we can now Ping Google™ for you to let them know your sitemap has changed. Click on the Edit button to set this per site. Sites that will get auto-pinged will be marked with this icon .
Biggest sitemap ever! (We're not sure; if you have seen a bigger one let us know). We were challenged to create a sitemap for mamob.com which has around 5,200,000 actual pages! The sitemap.index.xml points to 97…
We've installed a freesitemapgenerator.com forum. If you have any questions, suggestions or general feedback feel free to log on and post a message.
Track the effects of your Google™ sitemap! New free service provided by www.freesitemapgenerator.com. Let us keep track of the number of pages that Google™ hads indexed your site(s). Learn more about this new…
As you all know we spider your entire site to create a sitemap, and sometimes we come across a 404 not found error or any other problem. We would just ignore that page and continue... But now we save that information…
500 sitemaps created! A few were our own, so we waited to post this message until we had passed the 550 mark :-) which we did today! Thank you all for your suggestions and feedback.
Upgrade needed for upload package! If you are using 0.90 or 0.91 version of the upload package, you must upgrade to the latest version of our upload package. Previous versions are not compatible with 0.92. Please…
As mentioned on november 22nd, we wanted to include support for robots.txt files. So now robots.txt files are fetched and obeyed! It was prety useless to spider parts of your site to put in a sitemap if other spiders…
We have included a piece of code that can detect a session ID in the URLs. This will be removed to make sure our spiders will not keep spidering your site endlessly.
Thanks for all your comments on this site, we have now an official to-do-list, please don't send in suggestions that are already posted here :-) Todo list: obey robots.txt done!, auto-ping google whenever a new sitemap…
You can now have your sitemap uploaded to your own site every time a new sitemap has been generated! Sites that you have set to auto-upload new sitemaps will be marked with this icon.
We have added support for the <priority> tag. This option is turned on by default but you can switch it off if you want to. Use the Edit button per website to do this.
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