Recently, Google employee John Muller commented on the issue of creating a sitemap for a large site, published in Reddit.
So, Mueller does not recommend creating such a file manually, says SearchEngines. Instead, he proposed more suitable solutions.
The webmaster’s question was:
“I have a client in a very technical, manufacturing niche. The company sells industrial parts that are similar but very specific. In their assortment more than 2 million SKU.
My task is to create a site map. Since there are so many pages, I have to create it manually. I have a list of URLs broken down by product and category that their development team retrieved through the API. Since Sitemaps can only contain 50,000 URLs, I have 37 Excel pages with 50,000 URLs each … ”
Further, the SEO specialist described how he plans to accomplish this task and asked experienced colleagues to share their opinions on the topic.
John Muller left his comment. He noted that there was no need to create a sitemap manually.
“You need to get [the site map] directly from the CMS or the corresponding database,” Muller said.
One of the participants in the discussion also added that the site map can be obtained through the API that the developers used to retrieve the list of URLs.
When creating a Sitemap for a site, it is important to think not only about how to do this, but also how to keep this file/files up to date.
In the case described above, the product catalog can change significantly every day, and updating the site map manually will simply be impossible, notes NIX Solutions.