Google Sitemap

[thelocal]

I'd like to generate a Google Sitemap using their Generator. Anyone have basic instructions? These are the ones I'm confused about:

# Your web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed.
# You must know the command that launches Python. (Generally, this is python, but may vary by installation. For instance, if the web server has two versions of Python installed, the earlier version may be invoked by the command python and the later version may be invoked by the command python2.)
# You must know the directory path to your site. If your web server hosts one site, this may be a path such as var/www/html. If you have a virtual server that hosts multiple sites, this may be a path such as home/virtual/site1/fst/var/www/html.

Thanks!

[jason]

The sitemaps tool that Google provides is a shell script. Therefore you will need SSH access to your account and an SSH client, such as PuTTY. You'll need to open a support ticket to request SSH access if you have never used SSH on your account before.

On my server, Python 2.2 is available at /usr/bin/python2.2. To use this version, you would need to use the following to start the Google tool:

python2.2 sitemap_gen.py --config=config.xml

The path to your web directory is /home/USERNAME/public_html, where USERNAME is your cPanel login name (in lowercase).

Hope this helps.

--Jason

[Gwaihir]

USERNAME is also the username you've then just used to log in via SSH.

[Connie]

Depending on the size of your site it might be easier to use another site map generator, or make your own.

Google has a list of 3rd party generators on this page http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html.