A sitemap is a file used to share line-for-line information about a site. It mainly contains page URLs of the site. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use this file to crawl your site more effectively and efficiently. To summarise, it conveys the most important pages and files to the search engine crawlers. Document360 uses the XML type sitemap generator.

Accessing sitemap in Document360

Sitemap URLs are available only in Public projects.

1_Screenshot-Sitemap_access_project.png

  1. Go to Settings → Knowledge base site → Article settings and SEO
  2. You can find the Sitemap URL under the SEO section
  3. In the Select change frequency section, you can find how often your sitemaps are generated
  4. Click the sitemap URL to view your sitemap

How to change the sitemap generation frequency?

Sitemaps will not get updated instantly when you add a new article or change the article slug. It will be generated once in the selected frequency. It is recommended to choose the frequency as per your article publishing rate. Say, if you publish one or more new articles every day, you can set the frequency as Daily.

Follow the below steps to change the sitemap generation frequency:

2_Screenshot-Sitemap_access_project_frequency.png

  1. Go to Settings → Knowledge base site → Article settings and SEO -> SEO
  2. Under the Sitemap section, you can find the Select change frequency dropdown
  3. Click on the dropdown and select the desired period

Now the sitemap will be updated automatically once in the selected period.

Do I need a sitemap?

A sitemap.xml file is a necessary file that you need to have to communicate with the search engines. It will also come in handy if you verify your website structure for other internal audits.

What should I do with the sitemap?

You should submit your sitemap in the google search console once it's generated from the Document360 sitemap generator. Click here to know more on how to submit your sitemap in the Google search console.

How does a sitemap look?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2018-06-04</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Above is a basic sitemap example that includes one URL. It is a misconception that sitemaps have only URLs in them. It can also have metadata added to them.

Types of sitemaps

There are three main types of sitemaps

  1. Visual sitemaps- Used between the web project developers
  2. HTML sitemaps- Used for sites with large content, so it has lower impacts on SEO
  3. XML sitemaps- Most used type . They perform well in SEO as they are crawler friendly