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Sitemap generator

With Sitefinity CMS sitemap generator you can easily create an XML sitemap to inform search engines about your site, its pages, and various content and that they are available for crawling. The generated sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL. Once the sitemap is generated, Sitefinity CMS automatically pings Google and Bing who have their own logic and it may take a short time before the search engine crawler processes the sitemap.

The generated sitemap is compatible with Sitemaps.org schema that is read by most of the search engines. For more information about the sitemap protocol, see Sitemaps XML format.

You can configure Sitefinity CMS sitemap generator on site, page, or content item level. 

If you are working in multisite environment, you need to define and configure a sitemap for each site separately.

To configure Sitefinity CMS sitemap generator for a site:

  1. In Sitefinity CMS backend, navigate to Administration » Settings » Basic Settings » Sitemap.
  2. Define the following sitemap properties by clicking Change next to each property:
  • Sitemap name - the name of the file that contains the URLs of the site.
    NOTE: You cannot have the same name for two or more websites in a multisite environment.
  • Sitemap index name - the name of the sitemap index.
    The sitemap index is used when you have more than one sitemaps. This file lists all sitemap files, so search engines can find and process them. Sitefinity CMS always adds a Sitemap Index for each website, no matter if you only have one or more Sitemaps.
  • Directory - the directory where the sitemap index and the sitemap are stored on the server.
  • Split sitemap into multiple files if it contains more than... - this option allows you to define how many unique URLs a sitemap file includes.
    Once the specified unique URLs amount is reached, another sitemap is created and registered in the sitemap Index to hold the additional URLs. You can have up to 50,000 sitemap files, each containing up to 50,000 URLs.
  • Compress file to reduce the bandwidth - if you select this checkbox, after sitemap generation, the sitemap is compressed to a .gz archive to save server disk space.
  • When to regenerate the sitemap? - from the dropdown menu, select how often to generate the sitemap by choosing one of the options:
    • Daily - the sitemap is generated on a daily basis.
      In the at field, specify when generation starts.
    • Weekly - the sitemap is generated once a week, on the day and time specified by you.
    • Manual - the sitemap is not automatically generated.
      To generate the sitemap, you need to open the sitemap Administration screen and click the Generate Sitemap button.
      NOTE: By default, the sitemap generation is manual and this option is selected.
This section contains:
  • Include pages in the sitemap
    You can specify whether a particular page is included in the generated sitemap or not. In addition, you can also set priority for a page.
  • Include content in the sitemap
    Each content type can be displayed on different pages, which may lead to duplicated content. The Sitefinity sitemap generator includes an unique content item in a sitemap just once. Thus, if content is displayed on more than one page, you specify which page to be included in the sitemap.

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