Improve your Google ranking with our overhauled Sitemap system

A sitemap is a key weapon in your SEO arsenal. It’s an XML file which sits in the route of your site and lists all the URLs in your site. It allows a webmaster to inform search engines (such as Google and Bing) about which pages on a website are available for crawling and indexing. OmCore generates this file for you automatically, but recently we’ve overhauled the entire sitemap system we use making some big changes.

12th December 2010 published by James Moss

What’s changed?

Previously only pages that were in the site tree got listed in the sitemap file. This meant that pages that were generated by a module’s content type (such as a news blog or product’s details page) weren’t added. While this didn’t stop these pages from being crawled it wasn’t best practice. We are now enabling these modular pages in the sitemap, on a per module basis. Currently only the news blog and products module have been enabled as these were deemed the most important, as time goes on we will enable more modules to tap into this functionality.

OmCore also now notifies Google directly whenever a page in your site is added, edited or deleted. This means that your site should get crawled sooner and therefore new changes will appear in search engine results faster.

Better URLs for modules

We’ve also made a change to the URLs used for news blogs and products and introduced a new “slug” based URL system. A slug is a URL and SEO friendly string of text which has non-alphanumeric characters removed or replaced. Using slugs ensures your page will get indexed by search engines and still keeps it readable and making it easier for people to share the link on social networks.

Here’s an example, using an old blog post from one of our clients, Antony Hodari. The title of the blog is “Its ‘Team charity’ at Antony Hodari & Co. for 2009”. The quotation marks, spaces and ampersand in the title make the old style URL very hard to read:

http://www.antonyhodari.co.uk/news/Its+%E2%80%98Team+charity%E2%80%99+at+Antony+Hodari+&+Co.+for+2009/

Here’s the new slug based URL:

http://www.antonyhodari.co.uk/news/27/its-team-charity-at-antony-hodari-co-for-2009/

As you can see its much easier to read and search engines are more likely to index it. We’ve also setup automatic 301 redirects from the old style URLs to the new, ensuring that any SEO weightings from the old page get transferred as well as existing links on 3rd party sites etc.

When is this being introduced?

You should start to see all of these changes rolling out to your site in the next few weeks. If you have any problems or questions please get in contact as usual via support@omcore.net.

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