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Generating an XML sitemap

I have an assignment to generate an XML sitemap for my school exercise website and link it to the website. This seems pretty easy. For a test, I used XML-Sitemaps.com to generate an XML file for my art website, www.allafox.com. It crawled the site and gave me the xml:

However, when I pass XML-Sitemaps.com the URL of my school exercise website (http://nova.umuc.edu/~ct386b12/exercise3/index.html) I am told it scanned one page, and it gives me basically an empty xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
-<urlset xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

</urlset>

This is very puzzling to me. Can anyone please help me figure out why it doesn't work on my school exercise website?

Scott Fell

It is probably blank because they put a no-follow tag in the robots.txt file http://nova.umuc.edu/robots.txt

Easy enough to create y our own using your current site map as a base. Just replace the url. The home page will be "http://nova.umuc.edu/~ct386b12/exercise1/index.html" instead of www.allafox.com" and so on for each.

Google can help too https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en&ref_topic=4581190

They show

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> 
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2018-06-04</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Open in new window

This looks like a simpler format especially for the date.

Alla Fox

ASKER

Thanks again Scott

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