sitemap of community

[lradden]

Hi  I need to submit my community's sitemap to google web tools for re-indexing. How do I locate the sitemap of my community?

[ClaudiusH]

Hi,

The sitemap is located in the sitemap.xml file in your community root, e.g. https://community.logmein.com/sitemap.xml

[cblown]

Just noting that /sitemap.xml is the URL search engines review, as they understand the <loc> element. If you want to fetch the actual sitemap.xml to upload to someplace you can fetch it from the URL given within <loc>  https://community.logmein.com/logmein/sitemaps/sitemap_nodes.xml

[Fellsteruk]

Quick Q on this, I've just noticed i have boards in my sitemap however they are hidden from lists? shouldn't they be excluded from sitemap?

If not how do you exclude?

[cblown]

@Fellsteruk - Yes that is correct, you shouldn't see a hidden board in the sitemap.  I wonder if the sitemap is generated dynamically and it's taking into consideration you're an admin? Maybe try loading in incognito or while logged out... Let us know 

[ClaudiusH]

The "Hide from lists and menus" setting in the community structure admin is really only meant to visually hide entry points to that node from being listed on navigation pages and page widgets that list community nodes. Unfortunately a common misconception about this setting is that it can be used to hide nodes, but this needs to be achieved via adjusting the view permissions for that node. See also the feature documentation "Hide from lists and menus"

In relation to the sitemap enabling this setting should not exclude this node from the sitemap. Again: Default user permissions - which are the ones that are used to create the sitemap - are your friend here.

[cblown]

@Fellsteruk - I misunderstood you on "hidden" I had thought you meant by user/role permissions not "hide from menu".

Although @ClaudiusH doesn't explicitly confirm this above, I think its fair to say the sitemap should only contain boards that are "public" since getting Google to crawl Permission Denied error page isn't a great SEO strategy 🙂   

[Fellsteruk]

Thanks, guys...

For my use case neither really help me. I have an archive board which is hidden from the menu so its not accessible from the site nav however all content on that board is public, I've excluded it from crawlers using rtobot.txt so its not indexed but because the default permission is "view" its listed in the sitemap so from a "SEO" point of view it's at odds with itself because I'm telling search to index the page as it's in the sitemap but im then blocking it in robot.txt and this is then flagged by search console as an error. 

At the end of the day, i dont think !!! "stress the think" it's impacting my from an SEO pov, its more than it doesn't seem right but it is the only way to achieve it. 

[ClaudiusH]

Thanks for completing the picture. Indeed currently there's no simple switch to achieve exclusion of nodes and their content from the sitemap (There was an idea "Exclude URLs from XML sitemap" - it didn't receive much support though).

Some other CMs were in a similar situation though and it seems you can manually remove those areas from the Google index at least by using the Google Search Console. I haven't tried it myself but the description and a link are here: https://community.lithium.com/t5/Strategy/sitemap-vs-hidden-categories-boards/m-p/246492#M1789

[Fellsteruk]

I would have given that idea some love... Shame it's archived.

I have and do remove them from search console but its only a temporary removal not a perm fix as it will eventually re-index or atleast try to but that's when the robot.txt blocks them, as i say it "works" just not slick 🙂