Search engine management

Most sites will want to have their pages indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing, so that web searches for relevant queries will return content from your forums.

While search engines are adept at spidering your forum, XenForo can offer a helping hand with a selection of tools designed to assist search engines in their task of reading and indexing your content in the most efficient manner possible.

XML sitemap generation and submission

One such method is building and submitting an XML sitemap: essentially a list of all the pages from your site that you want search engines to include.

Naturally, XenForo can do this for you.

Options controlling the manner in which the sitemap will be built, the content types that should be included and whether or not the sitemap should be automatically submitted to Google are available at Setup > Options > XML sitemap generation.

A further Extra sitemap URLs option allows you to list additional URLs that you want to have included in the automatically-generated sitemap.

IndexNow

Going a step beyond building an XML sitemap, IndexNow provides a way for your site to instantly and directly inform search engines about your latest content changes. The IndexNow system allows search engines to understand which pages have changed, so that they can prioritize refreshing those pages in their index.

Support for IndexNow is as simple as enabling the Setup > Options > Search engine optimization (SEO) > IndexNow option.

Further information about IndexNow is available at IndexNow.org.