AutoMapIt Sitemap Creation Service

Long time subscribers of AutoMapIt have seen a few of the tools that I provide go into the mainstream search engines in one way or another. I like to think of it as a testament to my staying a step or two ahead of the search engines and designing tools to help keep you, the webmasters and SEO community, there on the front lines. Yahoo has just released the first-ever Beta launch of ‘Dynamic URL Rewriting‘ in Site Explorer. This tool is very similar to the “Ignore URL Key” filter that has been available to AutoMapIt users for a good, long time and allows you help filter a portion of a URL on your site. It is an awesome tool that helps you to be sure that session IDs do not make it into the URLs indexed for your site.

Most session IDs use a 32 character string of numbers 0-9 and letters A-F (hex-based). This means 16 possibilities for each character to the 32 (character) power or 3 with 38 zeroes after it… yup, a lot of potential page with different URLs all saying the exact same thing as each other. By stripping out the session IDs, these pages are consolidated into one.

Another issue that a tool like this could help to fix would be the ability to exclude URLs with certain keys or key/value pairs altogether. Yes, AutoMapIt has these as well. These types of filters are handy for skipping past pages such as action=buynow or redirect_to=htpp:///xxxxxx which typically all look the same and don’t really contain any unique content to the other pages like these…

Imagine a 1,000 page catalog… every item description page has a link to a ‘print version’, ‘buy now’, ‘tell-a-friend’… it usually doesn’t matter which product is shown… the tell-a-friend has the same form on it with a unique identifier. The only difference between one page and the other is the product ID code. Aside from possible a 6-8 digit ID number, those are 1,000 tell-a-friend pages that are exactly the same as each other. Plus 1,000 buy now pages that are exactly like each other… and 1,000 pages worth of print versions exactly like their parent pages.

That’s a TON of bandwidth that can be saved by using filters and tools like Dynamic URL Rewriting from Yahoo! Well, Yahoo has taken the first step toward this bright future and hopefully webmasters can continue to help Yahoo help the webmasters.

If you haven’t done so already, get over to Yahoo! and setup your filters… then come back to AutoMapIt and use the same filters AND MORE to help out the other search engines.

tags: Dynamic URL Rewriting, sitemap, seo

With all of the stats and numbers and reports (oh my!), it’s sometimes hard to notice the lighter side of things. I just read a blog entry on another site that I thought would help with a ring of truth among webmasters.

It’s about a new trend in making money for websites. I can back this up from an SEO perspective… if you build a unique and genuinely useful website, you are almost doomed to succeed. It seems the new trend will favor sites that step away from the pack and concern themselves with visitors first and income… also first.

Actually, this has been true for a good, long time. The pioneers and groundbreakers have traditionally done well, but so have many who have taken a ‘repeat’ idea and pushed it’s boundaries into new territory. One thing about most internet success stories… they focus on the visitors and what keeps them coming back. From features to service, putting your customers first is good business sense.

AutoMapIt has always been about unparalleled service. I have just added live support chat from Help Center Live to the site that will help out on specific pages that usually require some form of assistance. This is in addition to the email support, a help-desk ticketing system, and the forums that have been around for quite some time.

AutoMapIt contains many advanced features and stats. Sometimes it helps to ask what something means or how to make changes to improve your site. This Live Help system will keep me in closer contact with you for those times that you need a little more information than what’s written on the page.

AutoMapIt is proud to announce a more streamlined signup process. Several steps have been fully automated making it easier than ever to start getting your website crawled for sitemaps and tons of other stats related to your websites health. We now ask for basic information such as your domain, your email address to let you know when the spider completes, and whether this will be an upgraded or free account. That’s it!

After this, my spiders will visit your website and analyze the data it collects. You will have 6 sitemap formats uploaded to your website automatically, or available for download within minutes. As always, AutoMapIt will continue to spider your website from time to time in order to create updated sitemaps regularly. We still offer site search for your website with representative images for each of your pages in the search results. Just add a small bit of code to your pages and AutoMapIt will show your product next to the link in the search results.

tags: google sitemaps, sitemap generator

The long-awaited arrival of an entirely new spidering system is beginning to take shape!!

AutoMapIt has long used a simple spider to handle all of the information that I try to cram into your site stats. The philosophy behind this new technology uses ants as inspiration. The new ants each work individually from cached copies of your pages that the scout ants bring back to the anthill. Once we have your pages stored in the anthill, an army of statistic-grabbing ants sinks their mandibles into your content and determines keyword analysis, populates the site search engine that I offer, checks for broken links, webmaster guidelines violations, and overall spiderability and health of your site.

This new technology allows me to produce sitemaps for you in a fraction of the time that it used to take meaning a shorter time to wait for your sitemaps and a more regular spidering schedule. because of the architecture, I can now deliver your sitemaps to your server before AutoMapIt finishes calculating the additional stats!

The server load has overall been reduced due to this upgrade from about 10MB per running spider down to about 1MB per ant which allows me to coordinate the timing better and shift the number of ants crawling sites to increase the stats-ants when there are fewer sites to be crawled.

I have also added an adaptive crawling feature since the spider was sped up so fast. This technology senses when your server is having a difficult time trying to keep up with the spider and slows the rate of page requests down to match your servers rate of comfortability. The system adds a longer delay between crawling your pages whenever your server slows down, automatically!