Combining Sitemaps into one larger Sitemap

9/16/2005 10:51:00 AM

Posted by Vanessa Fox

Do you have several small Sitemaps that you would like to combine into one larger one? With version 1.3 of the Sitemap Generator, which we told you about yesterday, you can do just that.

This version includes a new input method: sitemap, which lets you point to existing Sitemaps that you created with the Sitemap Generator. The Sitemap Generator will create a single Sitemap that includes the URLs contained in each Sitemap you list.

To use this input method, locate the sitemap section of the config file and modify it as needed. You should include one <sitemap> entry for each Sitemap you want to include. Each entry must contain the path parameter, whose value should be the path and filename of an existing Sitemap file.

The example_config.xml file included with the Sitemap Generator download includes a sample <sitemap> section:

<-- ** MODIFY or DELETE **
"sitemap" nodes tell the script to scan other Sitemap files. This can
be useful to aggregate the results of multiple runs of this script into
a single Sitemap.

Required attributes:  path - path to the file -->

<sitemap path="/var/www/docroot/subpath/sitemap.xml">

This section gives one example. You should replace this example and include an entry for each Sitemap you want to include. Ensure that the path value is the complete path and filename on your web server. You can list gzipped Sitemaps as well, as long as they have a .gz extension. Rather than list each Sitemap, you can use wildcards. For instance, the following entry would include any Sitemaps that begin with the word "sitemap" and have an .xml extension:

<sitemap path="/var/www/docroot/subpath/sitemap*.xml">

The Sitemap Generator extracts all URLs and the optional data listed for each URL for every Sitemap you list and creates one Sitemap with this information. At this time, we can't guarantee that this method will work for Sitemaps created with tools other than the Sitemap Generator.