How to make a Yahoo! sitemap file using Google’s Sitemap Tool

Yahoo! has been accepting sitemaps very similar to what Google is doing with their Sitemap feeds. One exception, they do not provide you with a tool like Google does, that might make too much sense. I guess Yahoo! was behind in the game and went public without offering webmastes any tools to submit a text file containing your URL list in a plain text file. Initially I thought I could use something like Xenu - a link checking bot that gives you a list of valid html pages with no broken links. However it puts a bunch of goofy jargon in the source code that makes it very very difficult to create text file of plain jane URLs. So I ended up using Google sitemap tool to first build my url list.

See Google Sitemap help for detailed instructions . Here are the steps you need to make this happen.

1. Download Google’s sitemap tool from sourceforge.

2. Run this code to generator a sitemap:

   $ python sitemap_gen.py --config=

   This will generate an sitemap.xml.gz file in the location you specified in the config.xml file. You then need to :

   $ gunzip sitemap.xml.gz

3. Next, open this sitemap.xml using your favorite text editor - I use UltraEdit. Do a search and replace with nothing for:
   





   Use a regular expression to search and replace with nothing for:
   *

   *

Then you should record a macro to delete the extra line breaks and leading space. I’ve attached the Macro I used in Ultra Edit. Download the Google_to_Yahoo.mac macro. Pretty straight forward. Let me know if you have an eaiser way. I do have over 5,000 URL’s so doing by any other way then automation was out of the question.

Written by Tim on November 29th, 2006 with no comments.
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