Sitemap Builder

SitemapBuilder.net review

October 2006

If you are serious about getting visibility for your website, you need to generate sitemaps. A sitemap is a file that details at least the URLS in your site that you want indexed by the search engines. There are a couple of formats that Google and Yahoo will accept. Google will accept text files and XML files. Yahoo will currently accept text files.

The advantage to the XML format is that you can indicate parameters for every URL such as how often the page changes and it's relative importance. The advantage to the text files is that they are much simpler.

Sitemapbuilder.net is available as freeware. When you close the program, a browser window with some ads will appear. The application is fairly easy to use. One important item is the use of TOOLS - OPTIONS to exclude certain urls from being indexed. You enter in words that would appear in the URLS. For example if you had a folder called foo and a folder called private, you would enter foo,private in the options box. We found that you do not want to have any spaces. The problem with this is that if you wanted to exclude ads and you had a folder called brads, you might find that folder is excluded.

Overall the application works pretty well. We generally are creating text files called urllist.txt since this file will be recognized by both Yahoo and Google. We are using Google Sitemaps, My Sites and Yahoo Site Explorer. The text format, as stated previously, does not allow some of the fine tuning, but it is meeting our immediate needs.

We have one site that, for some reason, has a folder that causes Sitemapbuilder to run though the folder repeatedly and generate non existant URLS. Most likely it is some type of quirk with our site. We have deleted and re-created that folder but it still causes problems. (that is only one site out of 15. The other sites work fine)

Tips

You can increase the number of simultaneous connections under TOOLS-OPTIONS.

If you have a lot of third party ads such as affiliate ads, the program can take some time to run as it will need to follow the links. The end result will have those links filtered out.

For more information or to download the applications, visit their site at http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/

Summary

A great tool and the price is right.

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