News archive

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May 10, 2007
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 faster.

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September 21, 2006
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!

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September 15, 2006
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 sitemap was useless, try generating a sitemap again: it is better now.

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September 10, 2006
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 of bandwidth. I browsed around and found a page (on google.com) saying I should e-mail google about this. Well, see the next post on this page: why not compress HTML output to reduce bandwidth usage? If you have the right modules loaded in your Apache webserver, just a single line in the .htaccess file will do:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain

This reduced bandwidth use (by Googlebot and others) with 60%!

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September 2, 2006
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.

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August 28, 2006
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, this new sitemap will be uploaded to your site immediately. Because of the extra resources this will require, the Auto Queue feature is only available for premium users. Log in for more information.

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January 8, 2005
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 upgrade if you want to continue using Live Data. Just replace the code you have now with new version as it can be found in the control panel. Remember this service is still in Beta Testing. We hope to release a 1.0 version soon!

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december 13, 2005
Famous around the world! See this post at our forum. He/she even took screenshots! Wow! All I can say is 谢谢 (Thank you! I hope BableFish translated it correctly)

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december 9, 2005
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 post them at our forum.

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december 5, 2005
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.

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december 2, 2005
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. This may help you to solve linking problems. In general: make sure you have links from your homepage to the most import sections of your site.

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november 30, 2005
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 .

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november 27, 2005
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 different compressed sitemap files with 45,000 urls each. The total size of this sitemap is 35 megabytes (compressed with gzip -9) or 673 megabytes uncompressed!. Googlebot did come by to download all sitemap files.
(Note: Generating this sitemap was not done with the tools you can find on this site but we created some custom scripts to get data from databases and file systems)

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november 27, 2005
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.

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november 27, 2005
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 feature. And as always: feedback and suggestions will be appreciated!

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november 26, 2005
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 and make it available to you. There is a new button Errors in the control panel that will show you errors we found while spidering your site. Including the page we found the link on so it will be real easy to fix.

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november 25, 2005
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.

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november 24, 2005
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 upgrade as soon as possible.

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november 24, 2005
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 (Googlebot et al) are not able to fetch does pages too. It's still in beta and tested further. Feedback is appreciated.

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november 23, 2005
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.

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november 22, 2005
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 is uploaded, done!,

use gzip to compress sitemaps

...

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november 22, 2005
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.

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november 20, 2005
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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