Generate Site Map for Google
Was curious to see if anyone had created a template to generate a site map that can be submit to Google? Sounds like the site map protocol was built to accomodate the big 3, but not sure on that one. More info on the protocol format (XML) can be found at Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Is this something that every site should have, or is it only needed for sites that have content that is not easily accessible by the spiders? Not sure if there is an advantage to submitting your site map to the SE’s, but I would guess you get quicker results if anything.
December 28th, 2006 at 7:58 am
Yes, every site should contain a sitemap. A sitemap can be directly submitted but it can also just help in spidering the site. An auto-generated one that includes both pages and items and can be customized through a template would be a big smc “hook”.
January 4th, 2007 at 11:10 am
I was doing some investigation the other day to see if I could generate the Google site map as specified above using the tools/functions we already have access to so we did not have to bring the programmers into the equation. Since the smc_sitemap() function doesn’t allow you access to the display template, I thought it might be best to try to create the XML site map with the navigation functions and templates we do have access to. My attempts were unsuccessful!
From what I was able to gather we are going to require a function call that recursively returns all the children of a specified page_id. With the existing functions, only the pages that are direct children of the page_id specified are returned, not the children’s children, and so on.
I don’t think this will be an extensive task since something similar already had to have been completed inside the smc_sitemap() function, but we will put it on the feature list for now