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Cyotek Sitemap Creator: Features, Tips, and Best Practices

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Step-by-Step: Creating and Submitting Sitemaps with Cyotek Sitemap CreatorA well-structured XML sitemap helps search engines discover and index your site more effectively. Cyotek Sitemap Creator is a free Windows application that simplifies sitemap generation for small-to-medium websites. This guide walks you through everything from installing the tool to generating, validating, and submitting sitemaps to major search engines, plus tips for maintaining them.

What is Cyotek Sitemap Creator?

Cyotek Sitemap Creator is a desktop application that crawls your site and produces XML sitemaps (and optionally HTML sitemaps) compatible with search engine requirements. It supports features such as prioritization, change frequencies, exclusion rules, and incremental crawls. It’s lightweight and suited to users who prefer a local tool rather than an online service.

Before you begin

  • Ensure you have access to the website you’ll be mapping: know the root URL and any subdomains you want included.
  • Install any required permissions on the server if you’ll be uploading sitemap files directly.
  • Register and verify ownership in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools if you plan to submit sitemaps (highly recommended).
  • Download and install Cyotek Sitemap Creator on a Windows machine from the official Cyotek website.

1. Install and open Cyotek Sitemap Creator

  1. Download the latest Cyotek Sitemap Creator installer from the official site and run the setup.
  2. Launch the program. The main window shows controls for URL input, crawl options, and the generated sitemap preview.

2. Configure a new project and start a crawl

  1. Click “New Project” (or use File → New).
  2. Enter the site root URL (for example, https://example.com). Use the canonical form (with or without www consistently) to avoid duplicates.
  3. Set the crawl scope:
    • Include or exclude subdomains.
    • Limit to a specific path if you only want certain sections indexed.
  4. Configure user-agent and politeness settings:
    • Set a crawl delay to avoid overloading the server (e.g., 500–1000 ms).
    • Optionally set a custom user-agent string to identify the crawler.
  5. Start the crawl. Cyotek will traverse links and collect pages.

Tip: For large sites, run an initial short crawl (limit depth or number of pages) to gauge coverage and server impact.

3. Review and edit discovered URLs

After the crawl completes, Cyotek shows a list of discovered URLs. Review and refine:

  • Remove or exclude non-public pages (admin pages, staging URLs).
  • Merge duplicate URLs that differ only by trailing slashes, parameters, or protocol.
  • Mark canonical URLs if your site uses rel=“canonical” inconsistently.
  • Use filters to exclude query-string URLs or specific file types (e.g., .pdf if you don’t want them included).

Practical rules:

  • Exclude pages returning 4xx/5xx status codes.
  • Exclude login, checkout, and session-specific pages.
  • Include only pages you want indexed and that provide value in search results.

4. Set priority, change frequency, and lastmod

Cyotek allows you to set three important XML sitemap tags for each URL:

  • priority: value from 0.0 to 1.0 indicating relative importance. Use sparingly; avoid giving all pages 1.0. Typical values: homepage 0.8–1.0, category pages 0.5–0.7, blog posts 0.3–0.6.
  • changefreq: qualitative hint for how often a page changes (always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never). Choose realistic values; this is a hint, not a command.
  • lastmod: last modification date. You can let Cyotek extract it automatically from HTTP headers or set it manually. Accurate lastmod dates help search engines prioritize recrawling.

Set these globally via project settings, then adjust important pages individually.

5. Generate the sitemap file

  1. Choose output format(s): XML sitemap (standard) and optionally HTML sitemap for human visitors.
  2. If your site has more than 50,000 URLs or the XML would exceed 50 MB uncompressed, Cyotek can split the sitemap into multiple files and produce a sitemap index file.
  3. Click “Generate” (or Export → Sitemap). Save the sitemap files to a local folder.

File naming:

  • Use standard names like sitemap.xml and sitemap-index.xml, or a clear scheme if you split files (sitemap-1.xml, sitemap-2.xml).

6. Validate the sitemap

Before uploading or submitting, validate the sitemap:

  • Use an XML validator or the sitemap validation feature in Cyotek if available.
  • Ensure the XML is well-formed and follows sitemap protocol.
  • Check that URLs use the canonical protocol and host, and that lastmod dates are in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD).
  • Confirm HTTP status codes for listed URLs are 200 (or ⁄302 if redirect handling is intentional and reflected).

7. Upload sitemap files to your site

Place the sitemap files in your webroot (e.g., https://example.com/sitemap.xml) or a logical location where search engines can retrieve them.

  • Use FTP, SFTP, or your content management system to upload files.
  • If you generate multiple sitemaps, upload the sitemap index file to the webroot and ensure its internal links point to the uploaded sitemaps.

8. Add sitemap location to robots.txt

Add or update your robots.txt to point to the sitemap index:

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Placing this line in robots.txt helps crawlers discover your sitemap automatically.

9. Submit sitemaps to search engines

Google Search Console:

  1. Open the property for your site.
  2. Go to Index → Sitemaps.
  3. Enter the sitemap URL (relative to your domain) and click Submit.
  4. Review any reported errors or warnings and address them.

Bing Webmaster Tools:

  1. Sign in and open the site.
  2. Go to Configure My Site → Sitemaps.
  3. Add the sitemap URL and submit.

After submission, both tools provide status on indexing, detected URL counts, and errors.

10. Monitor and maintain

  • Check Search Console and Bing Webmaster periodically for sitemap processing errors, indexing issues, and URL counts.
  • Re-run Cyotek and regenerate sitemaps after major site changes (new content launches, site migrations, large restructures).
  • For dynamic sites, schedule regular crawls (weekly or monthly depending on site size and update frequency).
  • Keep robots.txt up to date and ensure no unintentionally blocked sections exist.

Troubleshooting common issues

  • Many URLs reported as “discovered — currently not indexed”: ensure pages aren’t blocked by robots.txt, noindex meta tag, or low-quality/duplicate content.
  • Sitemap not accepted: check XML format, correct URL host/protocol, and that sitemap is reachable (HTTP 200).
  • Crawls time out or slow: increase crawl delay, or crawl a smaller subset and expand gradually.

Best practices summary

  • Use consistent canonical URLs (protocol and host).
  • Exclude low-value and private pages.
  • Keep lastmod accurate for frequently changing content.
  • Limit priority overuse; use it to reflect relative importance only.
  • Submit sitemap index via robots.txt and webmaster tools.
  • Re-generate and re-submit after major updates.

By following these steps with Cyotek Sitemap Creator you’ll produce clean, standards-compliant sitemaps and help search engines index your site more effectively.

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