Scrutiny 12 Generating an XML Sitemap

Scanning your site with Scrutiny and generating an xml sitemap

Scanning the site and viewing the data

Scrutiny can generate an xml sitemap after scanning your site. This operation can be a scheduled action.

Scrutiny will automatically limit sitemap xml files to 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) and / or a maximum of 50,000 URLs, as per Google's specs. If your site exceeds this, Scrutiny will generate multiple .xml files and an index file to link them together.

When your scan has finished, choose the 'Sitemap' tab. Check that this list contains your pages as you expect. If pages have been excluded, you should see a message and be able to use the adjacent button to see the list of pages and reasons for exclusion.

'Change frequency' indicates to Google how often you feel that you update your pages. This doesn't oblige them to crawl your site any more or less regularly. If you generally update your pages more regularly or less regularly than weekly, you might like to change the default change frquency and press 'Update all'.

The 'Priority' you give your pages is a measure of how important you think each of your pages. Priority must be a value beetween 0.0 and 1.0. I suggest that you mark your home page as 1.0, one important page as 0.9, slightly less important pages as 0.5 and then decreasing from there. If you choose the 'Automatic' setting, Scrutiny will mark your starting url as 1.0 and then calculate the others based on the number of clicks from the home page, and use a logarithmic scale. ie one click from first page = 0.5, two = 0.3, three = 0.2 with all other pages = 0.2

For more specific control, you can set up some 'rules' to specify priority and update frequency for certain pages or sections of your site. You don't need to enter a full url - like the rules in your settings, you only need to enter a partial url. This way it is possible to specify a particular url or a section of the site, eg "/engineering/". If you wish to enter an entire url, check 'match'. With match unchecked, a partial match will do.

Exporting the XML sitemap and transferring to your server

When you're ready, go to Export.. & XML and choose where you save the sitemap file.

Visualisation

Visualisation images are fun and can also be useful for spotting pages which are 'out on a limb' or not very well connected.

Scrutiny can export your sitemap as a .dot file which can be opened by graphing applications such as Omnigraffle.

Scrutiny can display the visualisation itself, using a choice of themes. Simply switch to the 'Visualisation' tab. You can still export and display the .dot file in any external app, including my own SiteViz. SiteViz may have experimental themes not implemented in Scrutiny.