SEO+ automatically generated XML sitemaps

With the SEO+ module, you can configure automatic creation of XML sitemaps. Such sitemaps are intended for search engine web crawlers – like Googlebot, Bing and other bots – to more intelligently crawl your site. This is especially useful for very large websites such as photo library websites.

Our software creates a sitemap index file (sitemap.xml) in the root of your website and it updates your robots.txt file. The sitemap index file contains links to all other sitemap files (possibly hundreds) that are created by the software. You can configure the software via Site configuration > SEO, Metatags, Social.

SEO+ can be configured to create and maintain image and video sitemaps to increase the likelihood that your images/videos can be found in Image Search results. As per Google’s guidelines, multiple video / image sitemaps are created, with no more than 10,000 links to images/videos in each sitemap file. Links to these files are automatically added to the main sitemap index file.

Each image site map file contains optimized url’s for your preview pages, a link to the actual image (or video) and a title and caption. Note that you can configure the fields that you want to use. Below is an example:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>
      https://www.mywebsite.com/stock-photo-england-london-bloomsbury-charles-dickens-museum-image00530635.html
    </loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>
        https://www.mywebsite.com/cache/pcache2/00530635.jpg
      </image:loc>
      <image:title>Western Europe</image:title>
      <image:caption>
        England, London, Bloomsbury, Charles Dickens Museum
      </image:caption>
    </image:image>
  </url>
  <url>
     ...and so on...
  </url>
</urlset>

The main sitemap index file uses the following structure to direct crawlers to each and every sitemap file in the root of your website:

<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
  <loc>https://www.mywebsite.com/websitepages.xml</loc>
  <lastmod>2018-06-01T11:28:57+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
  <loc>https://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap-530635-531635.xml</loc>
  <lastmod>2018-05-31T11:28:57+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
  <loc>https://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap-531636-532435.xml</loc>
   <lastmod>2018-05-31T11:28:57+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
...and so on until all sitemaps are listed...
</sitemapindex>

The file https://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap-530635-531635.xml in the above example image site map has preview page url’s, titles, captions, and the url for the image for files 00531635 up to 00531635 (these are Infradox file id’s). A single url in the above image sitemap file may look something like this (note that you configure which fields you want to use):

<url>
  <loc>
     https://www.mywebsite.com/stock-photo-rural-chapel-at-night-with-lights-in-sky-creative-image00254578.html
  </loc>
  <image:image>
    <image:loc>
      https://www.mywebsite.com/cache/pcache2/00254578.jpg
    </image:loc>
    <image:title>Rural Chapel</image:title>
    <image:caption>Rural chapel at nigh with lights in the sky</image:caption>
  </image:image>
</url>
... followed by the rest of the url's

Furthermore you can have sitemap files created for each unique keyword in your database, for every gallery page, category page, contributor profile and contributor search results page and so on. And you can of course create a sitemap for your website’s static pages, e.g. your about us page, your contact page, terms and conditions et cetera.

Below is an example of a search category sitemap. This uses the category search structure that you have made with the Gallery manager:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
  <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <url>
      <loc>https://www.mywebsite.com/category/architecture-buildings/all-buildings-architecture.html</loc> 
    </url>
    <url>
      <loc>https://www.mywebsite.com/category/architecture-buildings/bridges.html</loc> 
    </url>
...and so on...
  </url>
</urlset>

Creation of sitemaps can be database intensive so you can schedule processing times that best suit your needs. E.g. between 24:00 and 6:00. Existing sitemaps can be automatically updated daily, weekly or monthly. The software can notify you by e-mail when a new or updated sitemap files are available. It is recommended to submit the main sitemap index file (sitemap.xml in the root of your website) to e.g. Google and other search engines.

To check the contents of your sitemap, simply type sitemap.xml after your domain name in your browser’s address bar. E.g. https://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml. You can then also open any other sitemap file that you’ll see in the index file, by copying its link into your browser’s address bar.

For further information and/or configuration help, please contact support.

Recommended reading: Learn about sitemaps on Google.com