Invision Community 4: SEO, prepare for v5 and dormant account notifications By Matt Monday at 02:04 PM
dacho Posted February 21, 2019 Posted February 21, 2019 Hello I am wondering how the 'Site Map' works -- does it just build up automatically over time or something? Right now ours just seems to be a fairly short list, a small fraction of the total content. I don't seem to be able to find any kind of settings to adjust things, so wondering if it just runs on it's own and takes some time or something...? Thanks
Daniel F Posted February 21, 2019 Posted February 21, 2019 3 hours ago, dacho said: does it just build up automatically over time or something? Yes, there's a background task which is building it up
dacho Posted February 22, 2019 Author Posted February 22, 2019 Thank you. For a forum with 500,000 posts, would that process be days?
bfarber Posted February 22, 2019 Posted February 22, 2019 We don't include individual posts in the sitemap - we include the topic links (as well as blog entries, downloads, etc.), so it's more dependent upon the number of topics you have. That said, for a site of that size, yes it will take days to update. This isn't a problem however - Google will continually read the sitemap. It's not a one time submission and anything not included is never picked up. The sitemap is submitted to Google once a day automatically, and once submitted manually in Google Webmaster Tools they will automatically periodically reprocess it as well from their end.
Black Tiger Posted February 23, 2019 Posted February 23, 2019 If I may ask. Will the sitemap be build as sitemap.php? Because that file already has some config contents. Or will it create a seperate sitemap.xml file?
bfarber Posted February 25, 2019 Posted February 25, 2019 Sitemaps are built and stored in the database technically. They are served to a user agent through sitemap.php, however. https://invisioncommunity.com/sitemap.php
Black Tiger Posted March 11, 2019 Posted March 11, 2019 Isn't there a way to create a sitemap.xml from IPS? Because when running Seo check tools, they all complaint that there is no sitemap.xml present. Most bots are (as far as I know) also looking for a sitemap.xml file and not for a sitemap.php file. Is there a way to solve that? Except for generating a sitemap.xml with external tools?
bfarber Posted March 11, 2019 Posted March 11, 2019 Bots don't look for anything - you have to submit your sitemap for processing, and Google accepts sitemap.php perfectly fine. There is no need for the extension to be ".xml" for the sitemap file. One thing you can do if you want, is to add a "Sitemap:" line pointing to the sitemap.php file to your robots.txt. Some spiders honor this and will be able to automatically pick up your sitemap's location that way. https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_txt#sitemap
Black Tiger Posted March 11, 2019 Posted March 11, 2019 Thank you, I already had that added to my robots.txt file, just the test tools were still compaining so I thought it was necessary. As this is not the case, it's fine by me. Thank you!
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