Sitemaps

A sitemap is a good way to help searchbots index your website, and increase your search-engine rankings.

plaintext sitemaps

The easiest way to create a sitemap (for a small website) is to simply list out each webpage on your site in a plaintext file, with one URL per line, saved as "sitemap.txt" in your website's root directory.

example plaintext sitemap

The plaintext below, if saved in UTF-8 as "sitemap.txt" and placed in the root directory at "https://en.wikiversity.org/sitemap.txt," would help searchbots to index those links and pages for their search engines.

https://en.wikiversity.org/
https://en.wikiversity.org/w/
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Main_Page
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/sitemap
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Sitemaps

notes

Always place your sitemap in the website's root directory if possible.
Always save a sitemap as UTF-8.
Do not list more than one URL per line.
Do not add any additional text or comments.
Do not list more than one host or subdomain, e.g. URLs for "https://www.wikiversity.org/" or "https://de.wikiversity.org/" should not be listed on the sitemap for "https://en.wikiversity.org/." Each host or subdomain will need its own sitemap.
Do not list URLs using more than one protocol. All of the URLs listed should be either just HTTP or just HTTPS.
Do not list more than 50,000 URLs.
The total size of the text file must be less than 50 megabytes.

XML sitemaps

Sitemaps can also be encoded in XML, and saved as "sitemap.xml" in the root directory.

example XML sitemap

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.net/?id=who</loc>
    <lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.net/?id=what</loc>
    <lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.net/?id=how</loc>
    <lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

external links

https://www.sitemaps.org/