Microsys Blog

If you have ever wanted an automatic way to create a visual sitemap of your entire website, check out this visual sitemaps guide.

It will show you how use our sitemap generator tool to create visual navigation sitemap for your website. Simply scan you website, pick the sitemap template you want to use and create a crisp and visual sitemap for your website.

If you are not satisfied with the sitemap styles and templates included in the sitemap creator tool, just create your own HTML/CSS sitemap template! You can either modify an existing template or create one from scratch, so it matches your website layout.

A1 Sitemap Generator Program Version 2.3 Now Released
Create text, HTML, RSS and XML sitemaps (including mobile, image and video Google sitemaps) to help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask to crawl your websites. The A1 Sitemap Generator crawler engine features lots of website crawling and sitemap building needs: Simultaneous connections, crawler filters, robots.txt, noindex, nofollow and canonical tags, meta redirects, custom timeout values, removal of session IDs, multiple crawl start paths, scan websites on localhost (address can be replaced when creating sitemap files), internet and disks, view broken and redirected links (enhanced in version 2.3) and much more

Creating the sitemaps is likewise supported with lots of options and features. Customize HTML sitemaps through templates. Split and compress XML sitemaps. Generate all kinds of XML sitemaps including image, video and mobile sitemaps. FTP upload the sitemaps created and ping search engines when your sitemaps change. And everything including website scan, creating sitemap files, FTP upload, search engine pings etc. can be automated through a command line interface to our sitemap generator program.

Pricing and Availability
A1 Sitemap Generator runs on all Windows platform (from Windows 95 to Windows 7) and costs $59 USD. The A1 Sitemap Generator program trial is fully-functional and allows to create all kinds of sitemaps. Further information on the product, as well as its free evaluation copy, is available from sitemap generator product page. It is possible to buy the sitemap generator program from the Microsys website. The program comes with an installer and uninstaller. The user interface is natively English but has been either partly or fully translated into: Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

About Microsys
Microsys is located in Aarhus, Denmark. The company is proud to be a member of the Association of Software Professionals (www.asp-software.org).For further information, you can read about Microsys.

The last few days I have been working on creating a database covering common questions I have received about Google Webmaster Tools, XML Sitemaps, HTML Sitemaps and the A1 Sitemap Generator program itself of course

The FAQ covers almost everything including how to diagnose and solve crawling errors, handle websites on unstable webservers, scan large websites, questions about XML Sitemaps Protocol, weird Google Webmaster Tool issues, how to configure A1 Sitemap Generator etc.

If you have ever had any questions regarding sitemaps, I highly recommend checking our
sitemapper tutorials and the new sitemap questions and answers database

The new release of our sitemap generator tool has gone through months of development with special focus on increasing website crawler performance. However, that is not all Lots of feedback (thank you) has helped me to improve program user interface, add new options and fix various issues across entire sitemap generator program including in sitemap builder, sitemaps ping etc.

For those of you creating XML sitemaps using A1 Sitemap Generator there are some excellent news.

I have been hard at work in engineering the website scanner engine with a special focus on improving the already fast crawler while also have it consume much less memory. I am happy to report I succeeded at both

Overall this update focused on:

• Increase crawler speed
• Minimize memory usage
• Various user interface improvements
• Various crawler engine improvements

If you are already a registered user of A1 Sitemap Generator, updating is as easy as downloading and installing the newest version.

Earlier today I wrote an article with a comparison of website sitemaps. The sitemap types explained include:

• Text file sitemaps.
• HTML and XHTML sitemaps.
• RSS sitemaps – RSS feed sitemaps are often used by blogs.
• ROR sitemaps – really RSS feed sitemaps with some custom extensions.
• XML sitemaps – also called Google Sitemaps and XML Sitemaps Protocol.

In my comparison of different site map kinds, I also explain:

• Background information and history
• Level of support by search engines
• Common and best usage tips and tricks
• Complete sitemap file examples

Have you ever wondered if ROR is actual RSS + some extensions? And howcome XHTML, ROR, RSS and XML sitemaps protocol all use XML, but still result in 3½ different sitemaps? Then read my article about website sitemap differences today!

I have recently written an article about crawling of websites which explains and shows how to solve many common crawling problems.

Things covered include:

• Having multiple domains with mirrored and/or distributed content.
• Consistent usage of www (or not) in front of domain names.
• Usage of Javascript for navigation.
• Broken links and redirects.

And many other things, about 10 in total, that can result in problems for a website crawler. The article focuses on solving all website crawl and scan problems using A1 Sitemap Generator. For those who have websites where crawler problems can not be solved, the article also shows how you can still create complete HTML and XML sitemaps for your website by configuring the sitemap creator program.

Read the article and make your website crawlable by search engines now!

Some time ago I created my first ever video about A1 Sitemap Generator and XML sitemaps as used by Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

However, one response I got was the question:
“You should tell us why we should pay you $39.00, when so many others are free!”

My initial response was “and so many of them are IMO crap”

I often get emails from people who have tried them all ending up very frustrated until they tried my tool.

Some unique features and benefits:

• For medicore sized websites, like 50.000 to 100.000 pages, my program can give much better linking and redirect information for all pages than other tools.
• Do you have a website large than above numbers? If you can live without detailed information like how all pages link with each other, you can change some scanning options and the limit becomes ~350.000.
• A1 Sitemap Generator can also calculate priority values for pages based on internal linking structure. Simply put, The more linked a page is, the higher its priority value.

Some website scanning options:

• Support for website crawler to “login” and scan password protected areas.
• Optionally obey robots.txt and nofollow/noidex attributes.
• Can go through proxies.
• Change useragent ID.
• Find links in CSS and javascript.
• Verify links to external pages still exist.
• Cutout session IDs.

Some sitemap creation options:

• Very rich HTML sitemap template system.
• Can automatically GZip XML sitemaps.
• Split sitemaps into multiple files when a limit is reached, e.g. 50.000 pages per XML sitemap.
• Create sitemap index file of generated XML sitemap files.

And those are just the simplest options. For those who need more control about website scanning and sitemap creation, they have it. There are also some qualities that are hard to explain, but still exist. For example how many types of links are correctly understood and normalized.

If I had to mention one more thing, it would be the sitemap/ignore/output filters one can configure the website scanner with. This, together with the automation support, makes is doable to maintain sitemaps for huge websites since one can very finely split scanning into sections. I believe I also here offer more options for the webmaster compared to the competition.

If you have suggestion as to what you would like more information about in future videos, please let me by posting a comment

• Made the HTML parser much faster
• Added BOM checking (in addition to server response headers and the “charset” meta tag) to identify the character set used in HTML documents
• Korean translation by Eunsook Kim, http://www.famun.com
• Fixed a bug concerning reading UTF8 translation files with a leading BOM
• Fixed a bug concerning website crawler ignore filters
• Fixed an issue in ASP.Net sitemaps (these can be used in ASP.Net controls)
• Fixed a bug related to LastMod in XML sitemaps

Read more about A1 Sitemap Generator or try it now

I released a new version of A1 Sitemap Generator yesterday with a bunch of news:

• Website scanner now uses a load balanced thread / work pool.
• Added support pause and resume website crawl.
• New “allow” crawler filters (complements “ignore” and “output” filters).
• Various speed and memory usage optimizations.
• Miscellaneous bug fixes etc.

To see all recent changes, see A1 Sitemap Generator news