Easing GoogleBots life

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Easing GoogleBots life

updated by rck, 2006-05-02

Googlebot the well-known crawler. A while ago, a new beta program of Google started. Google Sitemaps. There, Webmasters can upload sitemaps of their sites. Thus, pages not even linked properly can be made accessible to Googlebot easier.

Uploading happens with a well-defined XML format, which is specified on the Google Sitemaps homepage. I made a little php program to generate such sitemaps automatically out of the installation of a phpWebSite. You can even specify multiple phpWebSites on the same server and let the program generate a site map for each.

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Running the Script
To run the script, enter the directory sitemap. Now, call the script with php -f index.php yourcaption.com "yourcaption.com" is one of the captions you've defined during the customization of all_sites.php. The result should be an XML output, similar to the one defined on Google Sitemaps. If you get an error instead, double-check your all_sites.php file.

Automating the run
To make the script run automatically, you need some kind of reoccuring call. In the case of a Linux-installation this would be the crontab. I've written a little script, you can find it in Automating sitemap generation

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Google Sitemap
Running the Script
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