EXT: Google sitemap¶

What does it do?¶

This extension implements yet another Google sitemap for TYPO3.

There are several Google sitemap extensions for TYPO3 already. Why yet another another one?

There are several reasons why this extension is better than others. Here they are:

• it correctly works with config.baseURL , config.absRefPrefix and domain records. Every other extension does not work with at least one of these settings and creates URLs like http://example.com/http://example.com/path/to/page
• none of the existing extension currently create news sitemap correctly
• all existing extensions are implements as normal plugins and thus do not perform well enough

Advantages of this extension:

• correctly creates URLs
• adds a date of last page modification
• calculates page change frequency based on history of page updates
• creates news URL correctly
• uses eID feature, which offers much less load on the server

What it does not do?¶

This extension is made to be very fast and simple. It is not a universal sitemap extension for every record type. There will be no sitemaps for tt_products, tx_yourext_whatever or anything like that inside this extension. However this extension contains a way to connect external sitemap generators. Please, make them in your own extension if you wish.

This extension is coded solely for author’s own projects and it will work as the author says. The author decided to make it public with the hope that it will be useful “as is” and without any guarantees or obligations.

No support whatsoever (see GPL v2).

If your home page is a shortcut…¶

If your home page is a shortcut, TYPO3 will automatically load Google sitemap in the context of the shortcut destination. Typically it results in a trucated sitemap (only pages below the shortcut destination). In order to fix this problem, set the tx\_ddgooglesitemap.forceStartPid TypoScript option to the page ID where the sitemap should really start.

News sitemap types¶

Google has two sitemap types:

• “normal” (yes, this is how it is called!)
• “news”

Normal sitemap is used by a regular Google indexer. This is a sitemap type that this extension creates by default. It is suitable for normal indexing of sites and blogs.

News sitemap is used by the Google Reader to read news. If news from the web site should appear in Google Reader, add &type=news to the tt_news sitemap URL. This will force the script to create a Google Reader–friendly sitemap. Notice that normal Google indexer will ignore this sitemap completely. The Google Webmasters tools console will always show that zero URLs from the news sitemap is indexed. It is strongly recommended to put sitemap for tt_news in “normal” format to Google too.

For more information see the :underline:`news sitemap specification <http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7 4288>`_ .

You can supply a TypoScript object to make your own link. This will let you to add date to the link, for example. See here for details.

Better name for the sitemap¶

You can use mod_rewrite to refer to the sitemap as a sitemap.xml. Some people prefer this even though there is no any practical reason to do this. Google is happy with the default URL. Here is the rule:

RewriteRule sitemap.xml$ /index.php?eID=dd_googlesitemap [L,R=301]

Sitemap autodiscovery¶

If you’d like your sitemap to be discovered by search engines automatically, you can put them to your robots.txt like this:

Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml