Create an XML sitemap of your website for search engines with the Aimy Sitemap generator. You may generate an HTML sitemap for your visitors as well. Support for Joomla! and third party content given without extra plugins. Have a look at the features and options you can use with this sitemap generator to create your sitemaps.

Improve your SEO and website usability with this highly customizable and user-friendly sitemap generator.

 

# Aimy Sitemap's Main Features

• Set different options, for example per URL priority and change frequency.
• Use exclude patterns to prevent the crawler from indexing content or use the robots.txt as it is evaluated as well.
• Disable single URLs.
• Notify search engines about your sitemap and changes to it directly from the backend.
• Integrated robots.txt editor.

Aimy Sitemap comes with its own dependency-free crawler. You benefit from this approach as any third party component (like VirtuelMart, Hikashop, CCKs,...) will just work. Furthermore, the crawler detects broken links on your website.

However, crawling your website may (depending on the size of your website) take some time. Although larger websites are supported, we recommend using Aimy Sitemap on small to medium websites with a couple of hundred pages only.

Additional PRO features

• Unlimited support of HTTPS-only websites
• Automatic periodic crawls and sitemap updates
• More options for the HTML sitemap:
  • Hierarchy and priority view
  • Exclude file types (documents, images, multimedia files)
  • Language specific sitemaps
  • Editable titles
• More options for the XML sitemap:
  • An additional, compressed version of the XML sitemap
  • Optional values "change frequency" and "last modified"
• An integrated broken link checker (dead internal links and images)
• Automatic canonical URL handling
• Validate robots.txt in the editor
• A progress bar during the crawl
• Browser Notifications after a crawl of your website
• PostgreSQL database support

Why generate a sitemap?
An XML sitemap provides information for search engines and their bots to help indexing a website‘s pages and content.

By adding an XML sitemap to your Joomla! website you help bots to find all content. That is useful because crawlers often only follow a certain number of links within one website. By offering assistance for the crawler the probability of a complete index increases. An XML sitemap is especially interesting for:

• larger websites,
• websites with a lot of pages that are internally not linked well or
• new websites with only a few or no backlinks.

You can send a notification about your sitemap to search engines like Google to invite them to visit your website.

Which information is stored in the sitemap.xml?
Besides the URLs of the website‘s pages, images or other documents (like PDF-documents), you can add more information within a sitemap. That is the date of the last modification, the priority and change frequency.

The priority specifies the importance of the different pages within your website. The priority may help search engines to decide between two pages of your website if they are very similar. Therefore it makes sense to give information which is your most significant and detailed page for a topic.

The second information is the change frequency. If you tell the search engines how often the content is updated you let them know in which intervals they should come back again.

What is an HTML sitemap?
While the XML sitemap is for search engines, an HTML sitemap is for your website's visitors. It contains links to your website‘s pages – so it is an additional navigation and useful on larger websites.

Benefits of a crawler-based sitemap generator
A crawler-based sitemap generator like Aimy Sitemap crawls the website like a search engine bot might do as well. This way you get a check by the way, if your website is technically fine.

In our experience, some typical problems revealed by Aimy Sitemap are:

• response codes are not set correctly
• there are broken links on your website
• the robots.txt file is not configured well
• meta tags for robots are not set reasonable (e.g „noindex“ on important pages)

So the extension helps to optimize some technical details to provide a website that can be crawled and indexed well.

Further benefits are, that no plugins are necessary to add content from third party extensions to the sitemap: Any content that is linked to will be visited and its URLs added to the sitemap. This is also true for documents, for example if you provide PDFs for download.