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FreeSitemapGenerator.com News

October 6th, 2010
PDF files in your sitemap.xml
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 sitemap.xml. So we went to work and added new filters to our crawler: it now will add PDF files it finds on your site automatically to your sitemap.xml. You do not have to change any settings in the control panel to activate this feature.

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October 2nd, 2010
Sitemap vs No sitemap - the ultimate test - PART 2
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 the number of indexed pages per subdomain.
In words: the two top lines are the two subdomains for which we created and submitted a sitemap. Indexing was fast, within a week a total of 35,000 pages were in Google's index. For the English subdomain, which is 'www' (3rd line) it took a week longer to get indexed and it seems to take more time to get the pages crawled. It now has passed the 5000 line, while the two subdomains are declining. The other lines at the bottom are the subdomains we did not submit a sitemap for. With just one site tested, for a very short period, we do not want to give you any hard conclusions, but our opinion still is: a sitemap helps getting your site indexed.
The fancy graph was generated by Microsoft Excel :-)

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September 5th, 2010
Sitemap vs No sitemap - the ultimate test - PART 1
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 - so you should, see our links page but do sitemaps actually work? A year ago we posted a message on this page with some nice graphics of howmany pages were indexed by google before and after submitting a sitemap but now we are ready for a real double blind test!

For a customer we created a program to generate a sitemap for their database driven travel site. Each subdomain contains more or less the same information but in another language and has 125,000 unique urls. All subdomains are linked only from the English homepage and will not be promoted on their own. Our educated guess is that all subdomains will have about the same number of pages indexed by Yahoo!, Google and Bing. For two of the subdomains we did not submit the sitemap and did not upload it to the webserver. They just don't exist and all the spiders should try to figure out themselves all the possible urls. Now we wait. In about a month we will report the number of indexed pages for these subdomains. We don't take bets.

(and yes, our client knows about this test - we will add the last two sitemaps when this test is concluded)

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August 25th, 2010
We got an award!
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 this one came with a cool badge too.

Thank you guys and girls at WHS. Check it out.

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October 8th, 2009
Freesitemapgenerator does not understand IDN (yet)
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 will add this convertor to the add-url-form as soon as possible so you can add International Domain Names without having to convert them manually.

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You can read all free sitemap generator news in the news archive.