SiteMap

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Meis2M
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SiteMap

Post by Meis2M »

Hi again ...

whats your idea about a sitemap in 3.2 ?

Site maps help users navigate through a Web site that has more than one page by showing the user a diagram of the entire site's contents. Similar to a book's table of contents, the site map makes it easier for a user to find information on a site without having to navigate through the site's many pages. Also, in SEO, a site map can make it easier for a search engine spider to find all a site's pages.

thank u
Last edited by Meis2M on Sun Jul 25, 2010 7:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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A_Jelly_Doughnut
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Re: Site Map

Post by A_Jelly_Doughnut »

My idea? I don't know if it actually helps search engines, but it can't hurt the site as a whole. Whether or not the site map is present, the typical user couldn't care less.
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Meis2M
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Re: Site Map

Post by Meis2M »

yes. sitemap helps search engines.
a good sitemap with type XML is a big tools for a site.
u can help to improve visitors after submit the sitemap in google webmaster
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

actually

A sitemap is a collection of hyperlinks that outlines a website's structure. These links allow visitors to quickly navigate to any section of a website listed in the sitemap.

What are the advantages to having a sitemap?

Well, in addition to making it easier for your visitors to navigate their way around your site, sitemaps also make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your site. This can can improve your site's search engine optimization by making sure that all the pages can be found. This will increase your search engine visibility, as well as your traffic.

And since most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, having a sitemap ensures that search engines and visitors alike can access all the content on your site.

Do you need a sitemap?

Well, it depends on your site. If your site only hasone or two pages and hardly any content, then no. You don't need a sitemap.

However, if your site has multiple pages and lots of content, it definitely won't hurt to install a sitemap on your site. Here's a good rule of thumb: Once you get to the point where you are no longer able to include all the links to your pages on your home page, then you need a sitemap.

After all, anything that will help your visitors as well as the search engines navigate your site is a good thing, right?

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Re: Site Map

Post by Nelsaidi »

A_Jelly_Doughnut wrote:My idea? I don't know if it actually helps search engines, but it can't hurt the site as a whole. Whether or not the site map is present, the typical user couldn't care less.
This. I have never encountered a person that browses a forum using its sitemap - all the effort into making the template would be useless, and logically doesnt work out.

And Google/Yahoo/Bing and anything have no problem what so ever with finding pages on phpBB. SEO in phpBB is excellent as it is.

ps, nice copy and paste article ^^

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darcie
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Re: Site Map

Post by darcie »

In my personal opinion, a site map is not right for phpBB. I have used site maps on very large corporate type sites when browsing through their regular links looking for a certain page has failed. But this is good for websites with static content that might be nested levels and levels deep. On a forum, your index is like a map of the site, describing where everything is located. You can use the jumpbox to navigate between forums. Even for locating topics, a site map seems inefficient as compared to using the search function.
However, if your site has multiple pages and lots of content, it definitely won't hurt to install a sitemap on your site. Here's a good rule of thumb: Once you get to the point where you are no longer able to include all the links to your pages on your home page, then you need a sitemap.
The problem with this "rule of thumb" when phpBB is concerned is that the nature of a bulletin board site is to not have all the links on the home page. ;)


I think if you were operating a site that included a board, then a site map listing the entire site's contents and the board with forum listings may be handy. For only a discussion board, I fail to see the point. And I fail to see where including a separate site map unit into phpBB would be an efficient solution to handle site indexing.

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Re: Site Map

Post by ToonArmy »

I believe the request is for XML sitemaps for search engines, not a sitemap for humans. ;)
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Meis2M
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Re: Site Map

Post by Meis2M »

ToonArmy wrote:I believe the request is for XML sitemaps for search engines, not a sitemap for humans. ;)
yes its for search engines and i think phpbb need this tools.
phpbb dont need a sitemap for users ,it need for search engine for better submit pages in google or yahoo or....

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darcie
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Re: Site Map

Post by darcie »

Ah, a Sitemap vs. a site map? :lol:
I'm still feeling like it is redundant to the built in structure of the board itself, but then I'm in the anti-inorganic-SEO camp anyway. It seems handy when pages on your site aren't all linked well from the index. But in phpBB, all topics are linked from their respective forums which are linked to the index.

Where I could see this possibly going would be rather than having bots crawl the site as a user, they get a style-less or xml version of the site instead. They already don't get certain things that are irrelevant, so maybe take it a step further to optimize their crawling? But then would that make their cached pages turn out ugly as well? (My rambling here is spurred by this topic only, as I haven't had time lately to see what else is going on. Please forgive any of my ignorances!)

leviatan21
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Re: Site Map

Post by leviatan21 »

A sitemap mod can work for bots and humans at the same time :

Here you have an example :
For humans : Using the forum style
For bots like google that's require .xml format : XML
For bots like yahoo that's use txt format : List
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bonelifer
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Re: SiteMap

Post by bonelifer »

On a site which the domain has now been squated on by domain snatchers. I installed a sitemap mod for phpBB. This board had been around several years. It only had like maybe less then a 100 topics on google(known via Webmaster tools). After the sitemap and about a week or two, it had all the 900+ topics in their index. Why the forum wasn't indexed as well as some think it should have been, who knows, but I know the results I got at the time say otherwise. I'm fairly sure Google knows what it has in it's own index.
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