Google and Bing Site Maps

The term site map is often confusing because it means different things in different contexts. There is a site map page in the site which is made for humans to read and easily find all the pages in the site. But when speaking in terms of SEO , the term site map usually means the kind of site map made for bots to read and build an index for search engines. This is the kind of site map that you submit to google and other search engines to help them find and index your content.

Search engines will automatically crawl your site and find all of the public pages. But if you want to control things yourself, you'll need to register with each search engine, prove you're the owner of the site, and then you can submit your sitemap(s) directly to them.

Verifying your site with a search engine

Each search engine has its own way of asking you to verify ownership of your site. Some may ask you to upload a file to the root directory of your site, others may ask you to add specific tags to DNS for your site. The exact steps to do this depends on which search engine you're looking to verify with, and what web host you're using. If you don't know how to add a file to the root of your site or adjust your DNS settings, you'll need to ask your web host for that information.

Finding your Site Map URLS

mojoPortal content management system provides several automatically generated site maps that you can submit to google and other search engines. You should submit the url for main site map which is the site map for all the CMS pages in your site menu:

http://yoursiteroot/SiteMap.ashx

If you are using the Blog feature, it has it's own site map url which you should also submit to google:

http://yoursiteroot/Blog/BlogSiteMap.ashx

The WebStore feature also has a product site map, if you are using that feature you should also submit this site map url:

http://yoursiteroot/WebStore/ProductSiteMap.ashx

As of mojoPortal version 2.3.9.4 there is a new Forum Thread Site Map:

http:yoursiteroot/Forums/ForumSiteMap.ashx

If you have purchased Event Calendar Pro, it also has a site map for events that you can submit to google:

http://yoursiteroot/Events/EventSiteMap.ashx

Submitting Your Site Maps to Google

Google allows you to submit multiple site maps in Google Search Console. Because Google changes over time, we recommend you go to their help docs for more information. Currently you can find instructions on how to add a site map to google in their google developer docs.

Submitting Your Site Map to Bing

Bing allows you to submit site maps in Bing Webmaster Tools. Because Bing changes over time, we recommend you go to their help docs for this. Currently you can find instructions for adding a site map to Bing in their webmaster tools help docs.

What if they only let me add one site map?

While google currently allows you to submit multiple site maps, different search engines have different rules, and the rules may change over time. So what happens if a search engine only lets you submit a single site map? Then, you'll need to combine your site maps into one xml file. The format for the site map index is shown in this example, it is basically a list of the same site map urls that you submitted to google separately, but added to a single xml file. You can copy and paste this into a text file and name it sitemapindex.xml, modify it to have the correct site root for your site and put it in the root of your site and then submit it to the relevant search engines.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
	<sitemap>
		<loc>http://yoursiteroot/SiteMap.ashx</loc>
	</sitemap>
	<sitemap>
		<loc>http://yoursiteroot/Blog/BlogSiteMap.ashx</loc>
	</sitemap>
	<sitemap>
		<loc>http://yoursiteroot/WebStore/ProductSiteMap.ashx</loc>
	</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

If the file exists at the root of your site, you can submit the combined site map to a search engine with a url like this:

http://yoursiteroot/sitemapindex.xml

Per-Page Search Engine Indexing Settings in mojoPortal

On any page on your site, you can click the 'Page Settings' link in the admin toolbar, and then click the 'Search Engine Optimization' tab on that page to view your SEO settings. Here, you can specify priority, change frequency, decide whether to include it in the index at all, and override the cannonical url.

Priority

The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites, and only lets the search engines know which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl of your pages in the way you would most like.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Whether a search engine respects the priority in the site map or not is entirely up to them, mojoPortal cannot do anything to require a search engine to care about the priority setting. To get a sense of how well any given search engine is crawling your site, you should use the tools provided by that company such as Google's Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.

Change Frequency

This setting lets you give an estimate on how frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page.

Include in Search Engine Site Map

This controls whether the page is included in the search engine site map, remember that it has nothing to do with the sitemap page which exists for human users (you can control that separately using the checkbox labeled "include in sitemap" on the general tab of the page settings).

Normally you would want to leave this checked so that the page is listed in the search engine site map. However, if there are any pages in your site map that merely serve as links to external sites (ie you put a fully qualified url to an external page as the url for the page like http://www.someothersite.com), those pages could cause a search engine like Google to reject your sitemap! There may also be cases where you simply don't want search engines to see as part of the site map for any other reason, you should uncheck this.

Note:Not including a page in the site map does not prevent a page from being crawled at all. Pages protected by roles or security will not be included in the search engine site map, so this setting does not apply in those cases.

Cannonical URL Override

Correct cannonical urls are generated by default in mojoPortal, so generally you should leave this blank and let the cannonical url be determined automatically by the page url.

One exception to this rule is the home page of your site. If it is named Home it will typically have an url of http://www.yoursite/home, but the url http://www.yoursite/ serves the same content and you may wish to use that as the cannonical url. In that case you can enter it here. Be careful not to override the cannonical url with an incorrect url, as this can greatly damage SEO and could cause a search engine to think your site is being sketchy, in which case they might refuse to index you at all.