Better Sitemap Scraper is a fast and efficient tool for harvesting a list of all a websites pages/URL’s.

Features

• Simple to use – just enter the domain and the tool finds sitemaps automatically
• Fast – multi-threaded with proxy support
• Efficient – removes duplicate urls on the fly
• Scrapes nested sitemaps where Scrapebox can’t

Are you looking for the best sitemap scraper out there that you can use to extract URLs out of sitemap files? Then you are on the right page as this page will provide you recommendations on the best sitemap scrapers in the market.

Web scraping has come a long way from the era where you will need programming skills in other to web scrape to now that there are already-made scrapers that requires no coding knowledge.

One aspect of web scraping that you will need to deal with is finding out the URLs on a website if you intend to scrape all of the website’s larger part of it and you do not already have the URLs.

There are many techniques you can follow to get the URLs of pages on a website. Currently, one of the most efficient methods of getting that done is by using a sitemap scraper.

In this article, you will be learning what a sitemap scraper is and the best sitemap scrapers in the market.

What is a Sitemap Scraper?

It is a convention for websites to list their URLs in a file usually named sitemap.xml. Take, for instance, Gmail’s sitemap can be found here – www.google.com/gmail/sitemap.xml. Almost all standard websites that follow convention have this file.

Because the URLs are presented, there is no need to use operators on Google to find out URLs on a page or even crawling the whole website to discover its URLs.

Search engines use them also to quickly navigate pages on a website. A sitemap scraper is a computer program written to automate the process of scraping and extracting URLs from sitemap files.

Simply put, any web scraper that has the capability to parse out the URLs from a sitemap.xml file is known as a sitemap scraper.

Because of the standard, coding a web scraper that scraps URLs from a sitemap is not a difficult task, and as such, there are a good number of scrapers in the market, with some of them coming with no price tag on them.

Sitemap.xml link selector

Sitemap.xml link selector can be used similarly as Link selector to get to target pages (for example product pages). By using this selector, the whole site can be traversed without setting up selectors for pagination or other site navigation. The Sitemap.xml link selector extracts URLs from sitemap.xml files which websites publish so that search engine crawlers can navigate the sites easier. In most cases, they contain all of the sites relevant page URLs.

Web Scraper supports standard sitemap.xml format. The sitemap.xml file can also be compressed (sitemap.xml.gz). If a sitemap.xml contains URLs to other sitemap.xml files, the selector will work recursively to find all URLs in sub sitemap.xml files.

Note! Web Scraper has download size limit. If multiple sitemap.xml URLs are used, scraping job might fail due to exceeding the limit. To work around this, try splitting the sitemap into multiple sitemaps, where each sitemap has only one sitemap.xml.

Note! Sites that have sitemap.xml files are sometimes quite large. We recommend using Web Scraper Cloud for large volume scraping.

Configuration options

• sitemap.xml urls – list of URLs of the sites sitemap.xml files. Multiple URLs can be added. By clicking on “Add from robots.txt” Web Scraper will automatically add all sitemap.xml URLs that can be found in sites https://example.com/robots.txt file. If no URLs are found, it is worth checking https://example.com/sitemap.xml URL which might contain a sitemap.xml file that isn’t listed in the robots.txt file.
• found URL RegEx (optional) – regular expression to match a substring from the URLs. If set, only URLs from sitemap.xml that match RegEx will be scraped.
• minimum priority (optional) – minimum priority of URLs to be scraped. Inspect the sitemap.xml file to decide if this value should be filled.Usually, when you start developing a scraper to scrape loads of records, your first step is usually to go to the page where all listings are available. You go to the page by page, fetch individual URLs, store in DB or in a file and then start parsing. Nothing wrong with it. The only issue is the wastage of resources. Say there are 100 records in a certain category. Each page has 10 records. Ideally, you will write a scraper that will go page by page and fetch all links. Then you will switch to the next category and repeat the process. Imagine there are 10 categories on a website and each category had 100 records. So the calculation would be:The ScrapeBox Sitemap Scraper addon is included free with ScrapeBox, and it allows you to extract URL’s from .xml or .axd sitemaps. Sitemaps generally list all of a sites pages, so being able to gather every URL belonging to a site via a sitemap is a far easier and faster way to gather this information rather than harvesting it from search engines using various site: operators.

  The sitemap scraper addon also has a “Deep Crawl” facility where it will visit every URL listed in the sitemap, then fetch any further new URL’s listed on those pages that are not contained in the sitemap. Occasionally sites only list the most important pages in their sitemap, so the deep crawl can dig deep extracting thousands of extra URL’s.

  You can also use keyword filters to control what URL’s are crawled and not crawled, this is ideal on large sites that may contain thousands of unnecessary pages like a calendar or files such as .pdf documents you wish to avoid. As seen here you can also opt to skip URL’s using https to avoid secure sections of a website listed in the sitemap file

  Once the sitemap URL’s are extracted, they can be viewed or exported to a text file for further use in ScrapeBox such as checking the Pagerank of all URL’s, creating a HTML sitemap, extracting the page Titles, Descriptions and Keywords, checking the Google cache dates or even scanning the list in the ScrapeBox malware checker addon to ensure all your pages are clean. ScrapeBox also has a Sitemap Creator which enables you to create a sitemap from a list of URL’s.

  In all my years of SEO consulting, I’ve seen many clients with wild misconceptions about XML sitemaps. They’re a powerful tool, for sure — but like any power tool, a little training and background on how all the bits work goes a long ways.

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  Indexation

  Probably the most common misconception is that the XML sitemap helps get your pages indexed. The first thing we’ve got to get straight is this: Google does not index your pages just because you asked nicely. Google indexes pages because (a) they found them and crawled them, and (b) they consider them good enough quality to be worth indexing. Pointing Google at a page and asking them to index it doesn’t really factor into it.

  Having said that, it is important to note that by submitting an XML sitemap to Google Search Console, you’re giving Google a clue that you consider the pages in the XML sitemap to be good-quality search landing pages, worthy of indexation. But, it’s just a clue that the pages are important… like linking to a page from your main menu is.