Re: Looking for SiteMap enabled with premium support or Upgrades.

Posted by GregChapman on Oct 27, 2015; 11:21pm
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Looking-for-SiteMap-enabled-with-premium-support-or-Upgrades-tp7596023p7596029.html

Hi,

totol hossain wrote

#What are you expecting from a site map?
Ans: To submit sitemap to search engines.

But a forum by its nature only grows slowly and with all new material linked from the home page so a site map is unlikely to offer any benefit at all.

Site Maps only become necessary on shopping and similar large sites where much of the content is only revealed via a search of the underlying database not from the navigation menu or content of the primary pages.

#What are you expecting from a robits.txt file?
To give robots full crawling permission. For Example:

<-- Robots text code -->

Sitemap: http://www.forums.open.edu.pub/sitemap.xml

User-agent: *
Allow: /

<-- End Robots text code -->

That code simply says "I welcome any robot. Please crawl the whole site!" A search engine spider will do that anyway. The only reason for using a robots.txt file is to request that a spider does NOT crawl certain parts of the site and, as I explained, Nabble offers a facility to generate such a file.

So your first steps should be to post widely across the Internet and persuade as many different people to fill your forum with content. Then persuade users and others to create links to your site. (OK, search engine optimisation is a little more involved than that, but you'll need a good body of content before anyone is going to find your site interesting enough to link to it.)