Sitemaps
A sitemap is a good way to help searchbots index your website, and increase your search-engine rankings.
plaintext sitemaps
editThe easiest way to create a sitemap (for a small website) is to simply list out each webpage on your site in a plaintext file, with one URL per line, saved as "sitemap.txt
" in your website's root directory.
example plaintext sitemap
editThe plaintext below, if saved in UTF-8 as "sitemap.txt
" and placed in the root directory at "https://en.wikiversity.org/sitemap.txt
," would help searchbots to index those links and pages for their search engines.
https://en.wikiversity.org/ https://en.wikiversity.org/w/ https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/ https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/sitemap https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Sitemaps
notes
edit- Always place your sitemap in the website's root directory if possible.
- Always save a sitemap as UTF-8.
- Do not list more than one URL per line.
- Do not add any additional text or comments.
- Do not list more than one host or subdomain, e.g. URLs for "
https://www.wikiversity.org/
" or "https://de.wikiversity.org/
" should not be listed on the sitemap for "https://en.wikiversity.org/
." Each host or subdomain will need its own sitemap. - Do not list URLs using more than one protocol. All of the URLs listed should be either just HTTP or just HTTPS.
- Do not list more than 50,000 URLs.
- The total size of the text file must be less than 50 megabytes.
XML sitemaps
editSitemaps can also be encoded in XML, and saved as "sitemap.xml
" in the root directory.
example XML sitemap
edit<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.net/?id=who</loc>
<lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.net/?id=what</loc>
<lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.net/?id=how</loc>
<lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>