Configuration & Usage

You will want to create a template called sitemap of type XML and place the following line in it (nothing else):

{exp:sitemap:get}

For each channel you can choose whether to include or exclude it from the sitemap, as well as define its url structure, change frequency and priority. The url structure supports the following tags which work the same as the associated channel entry tags:

{url_title}
{page_uri}
{page_url}
{entry_id}
{weblog_id}
{cat_id}
{cat_name}
{cat_url_title}
{entry_date}
{entry_date format="%Y/%m/%d"}

Note that if an entry is assigned to multiple categories then only the first category will be used in parsing.

The change frequency should indicate frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines but does not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page.

The priority should indicate the priority of this channel’s entries relative to other channels on your site.

In addition to including URLs to channel entries you can also manually add individual urls. This allows you to add any pages on your site that do not have an associated channel entry.

Yahoo, Google, and Bing have all deprecated or completely disabled their sitemap submission end-points. For this reason Sitemap no longer supports this feature and will be removed from the UI in a future release.

For each channel that you include in the sitemap a Sitemap tab will appear when publishing or editing an entry, allowing you to select whether or not to notify seach engines that your content has changed. The checkbox is checked by default only when publishing a new entry. The search engines that are currently supported are Google, Bing and Ask. Yahoo recently removed its sitemap ping service so has been removed from the add-on.

Template Tags

Your sitemap template should only contain the following template tag. Ensure that there are no blank lines in your template as this can cause issues.

{exp:sitemap:get}

Outputs the full xml sitemap.

{exp:sitemap:get}

If your sitemaps are very large then you can define the start index and limit of the number of entries shown (Google’s limit is 50,000).

{exp:sitemap:get start="0" limit="10000"}

Notifying Search Engines

Google requires that you manually submit your sitemap location to them in order to allow the Sitemap Module to automatically ping them. You should submit the full url of your sitemap template. It only has to be submitted once and can be done from Google Webmaster Tools.

Troubleshooting

If any errors encountered when submitting a sitemap then you can use an XMLsitemap validator such as this one which will report the exact error and line number.

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