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.
Best Sitemap Scrapers in the Market
In this section of the article, we would be making recommendations on the best sitemap scraper you can use in other to extract URLs in a sitemap file.
As stated earlier, there are a good number of them in the market, and most are simple scripts that are not even popular. Here, our focus will be on the popular solutions that are free.
ScrapeBox’s Sitemap Scraper
ScrapeBox is a popular scraping tool used mostly by Internet marketers into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In fact, it is known as the swiss knife of SEO. Sitemap scraper does not come with the standard distribution of ScrapeBox.
It is available as an addon but free – even though the ScrapeBox tool is paid, so you can only use it if you have access to a paid ScrapeBox license. This sitemap scraper is one of the most powerful in the market.
It is multithreaded, has support for URL filtering for excluding URLs that do not meet certain criteria, and even has support for proxies – but you will have to add the proxies yourself.
XML Sitemap Extractor – By Rob Hammond
Arguably the easiest sitemap scraper out there, the XML Sitemap Extractor developed by Rob Hammond is one of the top sitemap scrapers out there. It is available as a web application and accessible using a browser.
All you need to do is enter the correct URL of a sitemap you know, and the URLs will be provided for you in a swift manner. Aside from the URLs provided, you also get detail about the total count of the number of URLs.
This tool also has advanced options for staging server that uses HTTP basic authorization. Interestingly, the XML Sitemap Extractor is available as a free tool without a usage limit.
WebScraper.io
The WebScraper.io is a full-fledged web scraper that you can use to scrape all kinds of websites on the Internet, including modern websites that are Ajaxified.
In this article, its general scraping ability is not of concern; our focus is n its support for XML sitemap scraping. It comes with a Sitemap.xml link selector tool that you can use to extract URLs of a website.
Its support is for the standard Sitemap.xml files and the compressed files (sitemap.xml.gz). If this tool comes in contact with another sitemap in a sitemap, it recursively finds all of the URLs in the sitemap before proceeding.
Web Scraper is available as a Chrome extension and is free. There is a paid cloud version that comes with more features and fewer limitations.
SERPShaker’s Sitemap Scraper
I must confess; the first time I came in contact with this sitemap.xml scraper, I almost passed as its frontend was very simple and minimalistic. There are no enticing visuals whatsoever; all that is available is an input form and a few texts.
However, it turns out to be one of the best sitemap scrapers out there. I have used it a couple of times for simple sitemap scraping, and it worked quite well.
The tool is available online and accessible using a browser. It is free to use and comes with no limitations. It is one of the tools provided by SERP Shaker.
- Google Scraper 101: How to Scrape Google SERPs
- The Best Yandex Proxies for SERP data
- The Best Bing Proxies to scrape Bing SERPs
Sitemap Scrapers for Coders
If you are a coder looking for a sitemap to integrate with your script, the above wouldn’t be a good fit as they do not have APIs that would ensure seamless integration.
For that, you would need a sitemap scraper made available in the form of a library, and there are a few of them you can use. For Python programmers, they can use the ultimate-sitemap-parser.
This has been reasonably tested, does not consume much memory, and can be said to be error-tolerant. There is also an XML sitemap scraper for Node/JavaScript. This is known as xml-sitemap-url-scraper.
Conclusion
Looking at the above list, you would see that we only discussed a few XML sitemap scrapers, which is unlike our previous listicles.
This is because sitemap scraping is pretty easy and does not really require advanced features, and as such, most of them do the same thing with no many differences.
