A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. The current limitations presented by web crawling is that there is a high probability that not all pages in a blog/website will be noted and registered with the search engine. There are also many variables and factors that are not addressed with the current methods and technologies used for website submissions. These limitations are what Google Sitemaps seeks to address.
There are lots of discussion I have read about “How to create sitemap for blogEngine.Net” or “How to submit blogEngine.Net sitemap to Google”. Most of them seems to be misleading to generic sitemap configuration which is different in case of BlogEngine.
Madskristensenwrote a very good article “Google Sitemap and BlogEngine.NET” on it. I am here extending it a bit more with some enhancement. I hope you will like it.
First of all, you don’t need to generate sitemap by yourself as BlogEngine.NET has a build-in sitemap handler. Actually BlogEngine.NET has many build-in handlers including sitemap. The following are the most commonly used handlers on BlogEngine.
- Sitemap.axd
- Microsumary.axd
- Syndication.axd
- Commentfeed.axd
- Opensearch.axd
- Rsd.axd
All the available handlers are accessible by writing http://www.yourblog.com/handler.axd
Here handler can be any one of them (i.e - sitemap.axd). So, to generate Google Sitemap just type http://www.yourblog.com/sitemap.axd in URL and here you go.
Handshake with Google
There are two ways to inform Google about your sitemap either manually tell Google about the location of your sitemap file or you can put the URL in the robots.txt file. Both way works fine, for a starting you can manually submit the site to Google and for next auto crawling you can put it in the robots.txt.
Adding in robots.txt is very important because then other search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Ask and Google can find it. Same Google Sitemap format is supportable by Yahoo, MSN and Ask.
How to modify robots.txt
If you didn’t modified your robot.txt file then you will find an entry in that file with - #sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.axd
What you need to do is remove the '#' character from this entry and replace “example.com” with your own website address.
Sample robots.txt file of my site:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /Account/*.*
Disallow: /search.aspx
Disallow: /error.aspx
Disallow: /error404.aspx
Disallow: /archive.aspx
#sitemap: http://blogEngineWall.com/sitemap.axd
I hope this post helps you to set your sitemap with BlogEngine.NET.
