We have a site with approx 1 million "yellow pages" listings. We need to create sitemaps for this. Google (and I assume most other search engines) will only accept sitemaps with a maximum size of 10mb and/or maximum 45.000 pages in each sitemap.
So for this site we need to automatically create a sitemap "within the sitemap". For each 45.000 pages we need to create a new sitemap. I am sure you understand what I am talking about.
This we need to do to help google index our site better.
## Deliverables
It is important that the sitemap follows google guidelines.
The following text is taken from the google webmaster page:
* A Sitemap can contain a list of URLs or a list of Sitemaps.
* If your Sitemap contains a list of other Sitemaps, you should save it as a [Sitemap index file][1] and use the XML format provided for that file type. A Sitemap index file cannot list more than 50,000 Sitemaps.
* A Sitemap file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. If your Sitemap is larger than this, break it into several smaller Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server is not overloaded by serving large files to Google.
* Specify all URLs using the same syntax. For instance, if you specify your site location as **[login to view URL], your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with **[login to view URL] And if you specify your site location as **[login to view URL], your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with **[login to view URL]********
* ********Do not include session IDs in URLs.********
* ********Do not include direct image URLs in Sitemaps. Google does not index the image directly; instead, we index the page on which the image appears. Direct image URLs included in Sitemaps won't be indexed.********
* ********The Sitemap URL must be [encoded for readability][2] by the webserver on which it is located. In addition, it can contain only ASCII characters. It can't contain upper ASCII characters or certain control codes or special characters such as * and {}. If your Sitemap URL contains these characters, you'll receive an error when you try to add it.********
If anything is unclear then please do contact me.
Ideally we would be presented with some sort of a software or a way of updating the sitemap ourselves.
We would normally update the sitemaps about once a month or maybe twice a month. Naturally, if we could setup a cron job to do the work that would of course be ideal.
Suggestions, input, solutions, other comments and ways of achieving what we want is more than welcome.
The most important for us is to get all our pages indexed with google. If you for some reason need the website adress in order to proceed with a offer for this job, send me a pm and I will send you the website url.
Look forward to someone who can handle this professionally and can give us some good advice on how to proceed and also deliver a stable and reliable service.
Please specify if your bid is for a one time sitemap creation or if you are planning on making us some sort of software or solution which would give us the possibility to update sitemaps "on the fly".
Thanks