Last updated Wednesday, Jun 21, 2006

Google Sitemaps Cron Job

I've recently set up a cron job to run the Google Sitemaps Python Script automatically each day. This automatically notifies Google of any changes to the site. I've found that new pages are being indexed very quickly.

Estimated reading time: 1 minutes

Table of contents

There are plenty of good articles out there about how to use the script provided by Google but I struggled to find information on how to set up the cron job for the task.

So in case anyone else needs it here’s a cron job that works for me on Unix. You need to make sure you specify absolute paths. If you don’t have root access then talk to your host but they should tell you where python resides. If you want to find out your document root you can find this in PHP by using the phpinfo() function.

This runs the scheduled task of generating a sitemap each day at 6am.

0 6 * * * /enter/your/path/to/python /enter/your/path/to/sitemap/_gen.py --config=/enter/your/path/to/example/_config.xml

Have an update or suggestion for this article? You can edit it here and send me a pull request.

Tags

• SEO
• Google

Recent Posts

• Build your own Vim statusline
  Statuslines in Vim are not hard to create. Making your own means one less dependency in your life.

• Custom Vim Bindings in tmux 2.4
  tmux 2.4 made a significant change to key bindings. Here is how to support custom keybindings for versions before and after tmux 2.4

• Using template files in Vim
  Vim templates or skeletons, allow you to specify a template to be used for new files with a certain extension.