How to Get Sitemaps Crawled with Python: A Guide with Code Examples

Sitemaps play a crucial role in guiding search engines to the most important pages on your website, ensuring they are properly indexed. Submitting and managing sitemaps manually through tools like Google Search Console is effective but can be time-consuming, especially for larger websites. By automating the process using Python, you can not only ensure that your sitemaps are always up to date but also streamline the process of requesting search engines to crawl them. This article will guide you through how to use Python for submitting sitemaps and requesting search engines to crawl them.

1. Understanding Sitemaps and Their Importance

A sitemap is an XML file that lists the pages on your website, serving as a roadmap for search engines like Google and Bing. It helps search engines discover and index your website’s pages more efficiently. While search engines generally find new pages through crawling links, submitting a sitemap helps ensure nothing is missed, especially if your website structure is complex.

2. Tools and Libraries You’ll Need

For this task, you’ll need the following Python libraries:

• requests: To interact with search engines’ APIs (e.g., Google and Bing).
• xml.etree.ElementTree: For parsing and processing XML sitemaps.
• time: To control the frequency of requests (throttling).

Install these libraries using pip:

pip install requests

3. Fetching and Parsing the Sitemap

The first step is to fetch and parse the XML sitemap to ensure that it is valid and structured correctly. We’ll use Python’s built-in ElementTree module for XML parsing.

Here’s a code example to fetch a sitemap from a URL and parse it:

import requests
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

def fetch_sitemap(sitemap_url):
    response = requests.get(sitemap_url)

    if response.status_code == 200:
        # Parse the XML content of the sitemap
        root = ET.fromstring(response.content)
        return root
    else:
        print(f"Error fetching sitemap: {response.status_code}")
        return None

# Example Usage
sitemap_url = "https://example.com/sitemap.xml"
sitemap = fetch_sitemap(sitemap_url)
if sitemap:
    print("Sitemap fetched successfully!")

4. Submitting Sitemaps to Google Search Console

Google provides a method for submitting sitemaps through Google Search Console. While you can manually submit your sitemap through the interface, you can automate this process using Python.

First, ensure that you have enabled API access to Google Search Console and that you have credentials for it. Use the Google Search Console API to submit your sitemaps.

Step 1: Install the Google API Client

pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client google-auth google-auth-oauthlib google-auth-httplib2

Step 2: Authenticate and Submit Sitemaps

from google.oauth2 import service_account
from googleapiclient.discovery import build

def authenticate_google_search_console(credentials_file):
    SCOPES = ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/webmasters']

    credentials = service_account.Credentials.from_service_account_file(credentials_file, scopes=SCOPES)
    service = build('webmasters', 'v3', credentials=credentials)

    return service

def submit_sitemap_to_google(service, site_url, sitemap_url):
    try:
        service.sitemaps().submit(siteUrl=site_url, feedpath=sitemap_url).execute()
        print(f"Sitemap {sitemap_url} submitted successfully!")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error submitting sitemap: {e}")

# Example Usage
credentials_file = 'path/to/your-service-account.json'
site_url = 'https://example.com'
sitemap_url = 'https://example.com/sitemap.xml'

# Authenticate and submit sitemap
service = authenticate_google_search_console(credentials_file)
submit_sitemap_to_google(service, site_url, sitemap_url)

This code will automatically submit your sitemap to Google Search Console for crawling.

5. Submitting Sitemaps to Bing

For Bing, you can submit your sitemap via the Bing Webmaster API. Here’s how you can automate sitemap submission to Bing:

Step 1: Get an API Key for Bing Webmaster

• Go to the Bing Webmaster Tools and sign up.
• Obtain your API key.

Step 2: Submit the Sitemap with Python

def submit_sitemap_to_bing(api_key, sitemap_url):
    bing_url = f"https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/api.svc/json/SubmitUrlbatch?apikey={api_key}"
    headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
    data = {
        "siteUrl": sitemap_url
    }

    response = requests.post(bing_url, headers=headers, json=data)

    if response.status_code == 200:
        print(f"Sitemap {sitemap_url} submitted successfully to Bing!")
    else:
        print(f"Error submitting sitemap to Bing: {response.status_code}")

# Example Usage
bing_api_key = 'your_bing_api_key'
sitemap_url = 'https://example.com/sitemap.xml'

submit_sitemap_to_bing(bing_api_key, sitemap_url)

This code submits your sitemap to Bing’s webmaster tools for crawling.

6. Throttling and Best Practices

When dealing with search engines, it’s crucial to follow best practices to avoid being rate-limited or penalized for submitting too many requests in a short period.

• Throttle Requests: If you are submitting multiple sitemaps or requesting multiple crawls, space out the requests.

import time

def throttle_requests(wait_time):
    print(f"Throttling for {wait_time} seconds...")
    time.sleep(wait_time)

You can call this function before submitting each sitemap to avoid overwhelming the search engines.

• Error Handling: Always check the status codes from API responses and handle errors gracefully, such as retrying failed requests or logging them for review.

7. Verifying Sitemap Submission Status

For Google, you can verify whether the sitemap has been submitted and crawled using the Google Search Console API. Here’s how you can check the status:

def get_sitemap_status(service, site_url, sitemap_url):
    try:
        sitemap_status = service.sitemaps().get(siteUrl=site_url, feedpath=sitemap_url).execute()
        print("Sitemap Status:", sitemap_status)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error fetching sitemap status: {e}")

# Example Usage
get_sitemap_status(service, site_url, sitemap_url)

This code allows you to verify the status of your sitemap and check whether it has been crawled successfully.

8. Automating the Entire Process

You can wrap all the above steps into a single Python script that runs periodically (e.g., daily or weekly) to check, submit, and verify the status of your sitemaps. Scheduling this script with a tool like cron (on Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows) can keep your sitemaps fresh and ensure continuous crawling by search engines.

def automate_sitemap_submission():
    # Step 1: Fetch Sitemap
    sitemap_url = 'https://example.com/sitemap.xml'
    sitemap = fetch_sitemap(sitemap_url)

    if sitemap:
        # Step 2: Submit to Google and Bing
        google_service = authenticate_google_search_console(credentials_file)
        submit_sitemap_to_google(google_service, site_url, sitemap_url)
        submit_sitemap_to_bing(bing_api_key, sitemap_url)

        # Step 3: Check Sitemap Status on Google
        get_sitemap_status(google_service, site_url, sitemap_url)

        # Step 4: Throttle Requests
        throttle_requests(60)  # Wait 60 seconds before next submission

# Automate sitemap submission periodically
automate_sitemap_submission()

Conclusion

By automating the process of submitting sitemaps with Python, you save time, reduce human error, and ensure that search engines are always aware of the latest changes to your website. Whether you’re using Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, Python offers a powerful way to automate sitemap management and keep your SEO efforts up to date.

With just a few lines of code, you can automate the entire process, improving the efficiency of your SEO practices and ensuring that your most important pages are always crawled and indexed by search engines.