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

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

Thank you.

For a forum with 500,000 posts, would that process be days?

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.

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?

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

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?

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

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!