Sitemap Generator Forum

Using free version of Sitemap generator, but have over 500 pages. Some .pdf files that I deleted from my site today are still appearing in the Sitemap. If I select the link in the sitemap to the file, I get at 404 Not Found page, so the file is definitely gone, just has not been cleared by the Site Map Generator. Have contacted the web hosting support, they had no solution. 
Is there some failure-to-complete problem with the Free version of the Sitemap generator if you exceed 500 pages?

Hello,

looks like you still have a link to that pdf file somewhere on your site. Sitemap generator adds PDFs directly in sitemap, so it won't detect it if you have a broken link there.

I don't think this is the case. I ran a search on my website for references to the invalid files, and the only references that appeared were those in the Sitemap at [ External links are visible to forum administrators only ]
e.g. Site map shows this entry:
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But this file does not exist on my site that I can see using FTP program, nor can you find BT530_DS.pdf upon a site search (except for the sitemap entry), so I don't believe it is a broken link.
So I ran this test. I added code to create a link to a non existant .pdf file.

<a href="Images/V158_DA-10_125x.pdf" target="_blank">Test no file</a></p>
to this page (near bottom of page)
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Then ran the Sitemap generator. It did not create a false V158_DA-10_125x.pdf entry in the site map.  Note there is a false link in the site map to another file I deleted recently
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So this is not an isolated problem.
Also, the free version of the sitemap generator used to provide messages upon detection of broken links, and I paid for that service at one point (more than a year ago). I'd purchase this feature again if available as it is very useful. Even the free version used to provide Broken Link alerts for one item at a time, which helped. Now I can't trust the program at all to advise me of broken links.
I have contacted the site hosting company to see if there might be an older version of my site files in memory somewhere, but they claim not.
Can you suggest anything else, or perhaps help me frame the right questions to the web host support. Somehow I think the problem is there.
Thanks
Stu Cox

Hello,

you can add that URL in robots.txt file as:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /GNNetcom/images/BT530_DS.pdf

First of all, I don't know what a robots.txt file is, or how to disallow files from showing up in the xml sitemap.  And besides, there are at least 14 .pdf files like this that I have deleted from the hosting server and at the same time removed the links from the .htm or .html pages on my site.
Even bigger issue is that the xml-sitemaps generator is no longer reporting broken links to me. If this can't be fixed, I'll have to find another service to generate my xml sitemaps for Google.

I have updated online generator with code to make special "head" http requests to check existance of those files, they should be detected now.
Thank you for your feedback.

Perfect. Problem now resolved. The broken links feature is now restored on the free version, and once I cleaned up a few broken links that had crept into my website, the Sitemap comes up clean with 477 indexed pages.
Thanks for all your help.
S. Cox - webmaster for [ External links are visible to forum administrators only ]