-->
All the websites have sitemaps, and some might use different formats or require authentication to access them. A sitemap is a file where you can list all the web pages of your site to tell search engines and web crawlers about the organization of your site content. It acts as a roadmap of your website that search engines use to better crawl your site.
There are multiple ways we can figure out the sitemap being used in the website. Lets look into few of the methods that we can apply to figure it out.
In general, most of the website follow some patter to put the sitemap url. The Most common sitemap URLs to try are as follows:
https://example.com/sitemap.xml
https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
https://example.com/sitemap/
https://example.com/sitemaps.xml
https://example.com/sitemap.php
https://example.com/sitemap.html
The robots.txt file is a text file used by websites to instruct web crawlers and bots about which parts of the site they are allowed or disallowed to access. It is part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) and serves as a guide for search engines, web scrapers, and other automated tools. These are just a guidelance for crawlers to follow but not enforced. Getdataforme makes sure we respect the guidelance in robot.txt
Though its optional but most of the website often put sitemap reference to help crawlers:
1. Go to: https://example.com/robots.txt
2. Look for lines starting with "Sitemap:"
Example:
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: https://example.com/post-sitemap.xml
Depending upon the CMS type being used to develop the website the sitemap location might vary. Lets look into some common CMS being used and the sitemap location for them.
/wp-sitemap.xml
/wp-sitemap-posts-post-1.xml
/wp-sitemap-taxonomies-category-1.xml
/wp-sitemap-users-1.xml
/news-sitemap.xml
/sitemap.xml
/sitemap_products_1.xml
/sitemap_collections_1.xml
/sitemap_pages_1.xml
/sitemap_blogs_1.xml
/sitemap.xml
/pub/media/sitemap.xml
/media/sitemap.xml
One tricky way to figure out the sitemap would be to make use of google search. Try these search operators in Google:
site:example.com filetype:xml
site:example.com inurl:sitemap
One easier way would be to simply look in the HTML source code for the website and check for the following link.
<link rel="sitemap" type="application/xml" title="Sitemap" href="/sitemap.xml">
One another approach will be to use the developer tools. Follow the following steps:
Finding sitemap is integral part of webscraping, at getdataforme , we prioritize it at most and make sure we use it to our best to provide accuracte and efficient data solution.