Elliott’s Moleskine

NOTICE: This script will soon be obsolete because of an agreement between Yahoo, MSN, and Google that will use your existing Google Sitemap file as-is. See this article for more info.

The Problem:
Everywhere you turn there are great little products to create your Google compliant sitemap. Of course, Yahoo! then enters the game to let you upload a sitemap as well, but the problem is - it’s a totally different format!

Personally, I use the Google Sitemap Generator plugin for Wordpress. The plugin works in the background and automatically generates a new Google sitemap whenever you post to your site. You can even tell it to add static pages!! It works wonders. In fact, one of my sites now has almost 10,000 pages indexed - and I mostly attribute that to this plugin.

BUT… I’m having problems getting similar results in Yahoo. So, I figured out I needed a way to take my Google sitemap which is so beautifully generating itself all day long, and turn it into a Yahoo! sitemap. A Yahoo sitemap is simply a text file with a list of urls - each url being on a new line.

The Solution:
I had a PHP script written that looks at your existing Google sitemap XML file, and then turns it into a compliant Yahoo sitemap text file! Brilliant!

Honestly, I don’t know why there isn’t something like this already… but I looked high and low… and literally came up with zero results! So, hopefully this page comes as a welcome suprise to you!

I’m allowing this script to be downloaded and used absolutely free. If you appreciate the script though, I wouldn’t turn down a donation or at least a link from your site!

I provide no warranty or support. You’ll be on your own…
DOWNLOAD THE SCRIPT

Requirements:
This is a PHP script. You need PHP running on your server as well as the ability to setup a cron job. Of course, you would also need an existing script that is creating a Google XML sitemap for you, and a way to upload files to your web server.

Instructions:

1. Download zip file from above
2. Unzip the file to your drive
3. Open the g2y.php file with an HTML editor such as Notepad
4. Follow the brief instructions in that file to edit the necessary information
5. Upload the g2y.php and yahoo.txt files to your server into the same directory as your Google XML sitemap is located
6. CHMOD the yahoo.txt file to 777 (You can rename this file to whatever you wish as long as you correctly change the reference to the file in g2y.php)
7. Setup the cron job. I have mine run once every night, thought you can run it as often as you like. I use the following line in my crontab file:
   0 0 * * * wget -t 5 --delete-after- http://url.to/g2y.php
8. Enjoy! Link to me! Donate if you wish…

Feel free to leave comments below so I know what you think about the script. Thanks for stopping by.

-Elliott

NOTES:
You do NOT have to use cron for this. You could simply edit and upload the g2y.php file and the text file, CHMOD the text file, then run g2y.php from your browser. After you see it’s finished, open your text file url in your browser to make sure it looks right, then go to Yahoo Submit to submit your text file url location.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.