Additional Sitemap Options

[bzcomputers]

Would like to see some additional options available to control the sitemap.

These are the current sitemap options available in XenForo 2.1:

1. Automatically Build Sitemap: On/Off checkbox
2. Automatically Submit To Sitemap Search Engines: On/Off checkbox with a text box to input specific search engine urls
3. Included Sitemap Content: list of Content with On/Off check box for each. Content options are: Node, Resource, Tag, Thread, User, Album, Category, Media Item, User Album Index, and User Media Index
4. Extra Sitemap URLs: 5 line textbox to enter custom URLs

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Suggestions for changes and additions (reference numbering above):

1. no changes
2. no changes
3. Included Sitemap Content:

a) Add the ability to set "Change Frequency" separately for each Content option. The "Change Frequency" options are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never.​

- it currently appears that "Change Frequency" is not set for any URL in the sitemap. This setting indicates to search engines how often the content should be re-crawled. There can be some search engine ranking benefits gained here.​

b) Add the ability to set "Priority" separately for each Content option. The "Priority" options are 0.1 to 1.0.​

- it currently appears that "Priority" is only set for Users/Members (set to .3) for all other URLs it is not set. This means all other URLs by default are referenced by search engines to have a priority of .5 (the default sitemap priority for unset/unspecified). Although this setting is relative to just the URLs on your own site, there is definitely some benefit to not having all site URLs (other than users) defaulting to .5.​

4) Extra Sitemap URLs:​

a) Add the ability to set "Change Frequency" for Content: Extra URLs (as 3a above)​

b) Add the ability to set "Priority" for Content: Extra URLs (as 3b above)​

c) Add the option to reference an "Extra Sitemap URLs" .txt file by URL that will be imported into the sitemap automatically prior to each sitemap generation.​

- for those with a large list of custom URLs outside the XenForo structure it would be much easier and less susceptible to copy/paste errors to maintain a .txt file containing a list of the their custom URLs. Copying/pasting/editing/adding into the current 5 line text box is not very user friendly for large sets of custom URLs.​

5) Add "Last Modified" information for all URLs​

- currently "Last Modified" is only used on XenForo in reference to the sitemap(s) themselves and thread urls. It could benefit to add this for all site URLs. This information can be very important in helping search engines know there is updated/new content.​

6) Add the ability to Exclude Forums/Threads from the sitemap: add the ability to exclude forums or threads by "ID". Useful for testing forums, etc.​

For those unfamiliar with sitemap structures: Sitemap XML Protocol.

 

[Mr Lucky]

If possible, I'd like to see some way to filter thin content, e.g. exclusion of threads with no replies, or threads with less than x characters/words and no replies.

 

[dutchbb]

Google mostly ignores "Change Frequency" or "priority" and "lastmod"

Google Says Sitemap Priority Field Is "A Bag Of Noise"

Google has always downplayed the importance of priority and chance frequency in the XML sitemap files. They have told webmasters to not worry about it and even said they ignore other fields like the lastmod date. That being said, Google's Gary Illyes put it to webmasters another way. He said...

www.seroundtable.com

Google Downplays Use Of Priority & Change Frequency In XML Sitemap File

Google's John Mueller was asked in a video hangout on Google+ this morning if priority and change frequency matter much in XML Sitemaps and John from Google said nope. The question was asked at the 29:35 mark: Does priority and frequency matter in a sitemap? If not, how can we tell Google to...

www.seroundtable.com

Google Says They Mostly Ignore the lastmod Tag In XML Sitemaps

Gary Illyes has recently been pretty active in the StackOverflow forums and just posted in a Stack Overflow thread that Google, and other search engines, mostly ignore the lastmod tag found within XML Sitemap files. He said: The lastmod tag is optional in sitmaps and in most of the cases it's...

www.seroundtable.com

 

[bzcomputers]

Google mostly ignores "Change Frequency" or "priority" and "lastmod"

Here is an article from the same website and same author you linked to above posted 5 months later saying they do look at "lastmod" date

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-url-last-modification-date-24319.html


How much this information is weighted by Google we will probably never exactly know. The one thing for sure is, if it isn't there it can't help us at all.

 

[bzcomputers]

How often is the sitemap rebuilt?

I've been working on a test installation and had some threads and resources that were a couple months old (over 70 days for some) and they were still not appearing in the sitemap. I manually rebuilt the sitemap through tools and they now show correctly.

Maybe adding a user option for rebuild frequency would be useful also.