XML Sitemap

  • 17 April 2020
  • 6 replies
  • 342 views
Yoeri
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  • Yoeri
  • Gainsight Employee: Golden Ruler
  • 345 replies

Our community platform auto-generates an XML Sitemap based on your category- and group pages. This sitemap helps search engines to quickly discover important and relevant URLs.

Locate your XML Sitemap

The sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml  where ‘example’ should be replaced by your domain name.

Example of XML Sitemap

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/category-1</loc>
<changefreq>hourly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>
https://example.com/category-2
</loc>
<changefreq>hourly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Add sitemap to your Robots.txt

It’s a good practice to add a link the Sitemap.xml in your Robots.txt file, here’s how you can do that:

  1. Locate your sitemap ULR (see above)
  2. Go to Control → Settings → Robots.txt
  3. Add Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml to the Robots.txt file
  4. Press Save changes

Use RSS Feed to generate an XML Sitemap

You can also use your RSS feed to generate a sitemap. See this article for instructions: Tips & Tricks - How to use the RSS feed to generate an XML sitemap

6 replies

timcavey
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Who here is good at SEO best practice? 

 

In getting up to speed on XML sitemaps and Robots.txt, I saw a Google help page tell me repeatedly that Robots.txt wasn't the best place to prevent crawlers reaching and indexing parts of your site. To do this, use ‘noindex’, I was told. 

 

However we’ve recently added a load of ‘disallow’ rules to our Robots.txt file. Such ad postIDs, userIDs etc. In fact our Robots.txt file appears to only be a set of rules to disallow certain parts of a URL and our XML sitemap. Are we being naughty?

learning, sharing and repeat
M
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I see in this post that Gainsight automatically creates a category-based sitemap, which I am able to find. Is it possible to get a sitemap for the contents of each category (i.e. the posts in them)?

Yoeri
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Userlevel 2
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I see in this post that Gainsight automatically creates a category-based sitemap, which I am able to find. Is it possible to get a sitemap for the contents of each category (i.e. the posts in them)?

Hey Mbuuck, our XML file will only display the category and group structure. We also have a separate RSS feed available (add /feed/topics/ to your community URL to see, e.g. https://communities.gainsight.com/feed/topics) that will display individual posts and the categories that they are linked to.

M
Rank

Thank you @Yoeri! It looks like I can also use that RSS feed to work as a sitemap if I add it to my robots.txt file, correct? 

M
Rank

Am I also correct in understanding that the RSS feed includes topics, but not categories or the homepage?

C
Rank

Thank you @Yoeri! It looks like I can also use that RSS feed to work as a sitemap if I add it to my robots.txt file, correct? 

Yes that is possible, see more info here: Tips & Tricks - How to use the RSS feed to generate an XML sitemap

Am I also correct in understanding that the RSS feed includes topics, but not categories or the homepage?

Correct, the RSS feed only contains topics

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