[imported_silkroad]

Here is my prior instructions for writing a script for sitemaps / language:

Originally Posted by imported_silkroad

I do not recommend people use the shared mod for the vBSEO sitemap generator for the following reasons:

The mod "interweaves" the language links (link.html?language=flag) in a serial manner, so when you work with Google sitemaps, you have no idea how much of the translated pages have been indexed in your sitemaps.

This is OK, and you can certainly do this "kludge" if you wish, if you are not comfy with a little manual labor and command line performance

If you want more control over your sitemaps (so you can submit Chinese language sitemaps to China, etc. and also watch the indexing process of each language) then I advise you to do something like this (what we do and it works great!):

(1) Copy the vBSEO sitemap files to another directory, for example for Korean, you could create a /sitemaps/ko directory and copy all the sitemaps from the ./vbseo_sitemaps/data directory over there.

(2) Unzip all the files with gzip -d.

(2) Edit the index file, sitemap_index.xml and put the path to the directory where you have the specific language sitemaps. You can do this with vi, for example, in 2 seconds, or sed in about the same time or less.

(3) Use sed to append ?language=flag, for example ?language=ko (for Korean) at the end of your loc files, for example </loc> tag, sed to ?language=ko</loc> This takes about 3 - 5 seconds on a big site with a 400K links in the sitemap. ( Update: You can also use sed to add SEO optimized tags in the URL, i.e. www.yoursite.com/ko/link_to_your_favorite_thread.html ')

(4) gzip the files.

(5) Manually add the sitemap -- sitemap/ko/sitemap_index.xml.gz (in the example above) to your favorite search engine webmaster dashboard

Well, you don't have to follow our advice, but that is how we do it, and we like it much better than the "interwoven, giant, humongous sitemap" method hack provided so far.

You certainly can do it that way, if you have a small site and don't actively manage your sitemaps. Or you can do it that way if you don't care

However, if you want to observe / manage the actual progress of how your various languages are indexed, I recommend you make a sitemap_index.xml.gz for each language, as outlined above. It takes only about 15 - 30 seconds max for each sitemap, so if you use only the top 10 Internet-languages like we do, then it only takes a few minutes, between 5 and 10 minutes manual labor.

Then again, you can use any method you like

I am simply sharing how we do it, and it works great. We tried "the other way" and found it "unmanagable" for a site with over 400K links in the origin language sitemap. It take a while for Google to index a large sitemap anyway, so we recommend you focus on the top 10 Internet-languages for maximum benefit :up:

Cheers!

Note, this is really easy to do! Please try on your own and don't make one huge sitemap for all your languages !!