If your website is huge like mine, than you surely know how frustrating online sitemap tools are. Online sitemap generators are typically limited to around 500 pages and lack the robust features that offline xml sitemap generators can provide. It’s essential that you include all the pages you want to have google index in your google sitemap file. Get an offline xml sitemap generator that is designed for more than 500 urls (some are even unrestricted).

Since most downloadable tools don’t have site size limits, you won’t have any difficulties right? But if your xml sitemap is bigger than 50,000 pages you’ll have to divide it into several sitemap files. Why? Because Google restricts each individual google sitemap file to at the most 50,000 URLs (or 10MB, whichever comes first). Splitting your xml sitemap is fairly straight forward, ensure that each google sitemap file has at most 50,000 pages (and that you don’t have duplicate URLs the sitemaps between the files). Name your individual xml sitemap files along these lines: sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml, etc.

Generating the google sitemap index file is pretty easy also. It is merely another XML file (a bit different from a sitemap) that contains links to the individual xml sitemap files. More details are available here:
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#index

If you’re anything like me and you wouldn’t want the bother of splitting and making the index yourself, you can download a program like Inspyder Sitemap Creator where it can handle all this for you. I like the Inspyder tool because it will automatically split the sitemap if it exceeds 50,000 pages and create the sitemap index file for you. It has no page limits, so it is compatible with huge sites like mine. It handles the FTP upload and pinging so once it’s configured, it’s on auto-pilot.

As I mentioned earlier, google sitemaps are an essential contribution of any SEO strategy. If you are still using free web-based tools, consider taking your sitemap to the next level with an offline xml sitemap generator. I think you will find that the investment makes sense in no time. I know it did for me.

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