Use Sitemaps to improve search results for your site

(Website Administrator only)

Sitemaps help internet search engines learn about and find all the pages of your organization's website. Sitemaps are documented lists of website pages.

How do I set up sitemaps for CMS?

To get set up:

  1. Enable sitemaps

  2. Submit your sitemap to search engines

How do sitemaps work in CMS?

After you enable the feature (it is disabled by default), two files are automatically generated nightly for your site:

  • sitemap-index.xml - This is the sitemap index file. The URL location is: http://www.yourwebsite.org/sitemap-index.xml

  • sitemap.xml.gz - This zipped archive file is the sitemap data file for your site. The URL location is: http://www.yourwebsite.org/sitemap.xml.gz

What is the index file?

You will provide search engines, such as Google, where to find your index file. The index file provides the archive file location to the search engine.

Note: You are responsible for notifying search engine crawlers about the location of the index file. See Submit Your Sitemap to Search Engines.

What is the archive file?

The archive file provides the actual sitemap data from which search engines can pick up all URLs available on your site for crawling, even those not available by following links within the site. This can significantly improve search results. The archive file is different from the sitemap web page that outlines a site's contents and structure to help visitors with navigation.

An entry is created in the archive file for each published item on your site. Items are listed by last published date in descending order.

Note: Only publicly visible, published, Live items are included in the file. Nonpublic pages, such as members-only or group-members-only, folders or content (restricted to registered constituents) are not included.

The archive file is not visible in Website Explorer.

The archive file's contents indicate the URLs of all individual published content items on the site for all content types of base type Web Page, Image, or File, with the following information for each URL:

Tag Description
<loc> URL of content item
<lastmod> Date of last modification of the item
<changefreq>

How frequently the page is likely to change. The default "weekly" setting is not editable

Search engines use this value to determine how often to index the page. The value is used as a guideline only; for instance, a search engine may crawl pages marked "weekly" more (or less) frequently than every week

For example:

 <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-
instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/
sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd"> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/main-web-page.html</loc> <lastmod>2009-08-07</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/main-image.jpg</loc> <lastmod>2009-08-07</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/main-file.exe</loc> <lastmod>2009-08-07</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/includes/contact-info.html</loc> <lastmod>2009-08-07</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/public-search-page.html</loc> <lastmod>2009-04-06</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/index.html</loc> <lastmod>2009-01-13</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/custom-access-denied.html</loc> <lastmod>2009-01-08</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/crm-content-and-tags/crm-taf.html</loc> <lastmod>2015-12-31</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/files/statistics.xlsx</loc> <lastmod>2015-12-30</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/files/document.docx</loc> <lastmod>2015-12-30</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/files/brochure.pdf</loc> <lastmod>2015-12-30</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/includes/wrapper.html</loc> <lastmod>2015-12-17</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/assets/athens.jpg</loc> <lastmod>2015-11-23</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/comments/comments-form-with-list.html</loc> <lastmod>2015-10-23</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/crm-content-and-tags/crm-survey.html</loc> <lastmod>2015-10-16</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq></url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/group-members-only-custom-sign-in/page-with-crm-content.html</loc> <lastmod>2015-06-12</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourwebsite.org/custom-sign-in-page.html</loc> <lastmod>2015-06-03</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> </urlset>

In the above example, the sitemap located at http://www.yourwebsite.org/sitemap.xml.gz, lists multiple items in descending order by last published date. The most recent item, main-web-page.html, is displayed first with the date it was last updated (August 7, 2015).

See http://www.sitemaps.org/ for more information about Sitemaps protocol, file formats, and the different processes for submitting sitemap files to search engines.