Set up an XML sitemap of your site to make sure that search engines know what you consider important on your site. It will help them crawl your Drupal Gardens website more intelligently and produce more nuanced and accurate search results - including direct links to important internal pages for your site like in the example below.
The XML sitemap module creates a standards-compliant sitemap and submits it daily to several search engines.
How to set up your sitemap
You need to consider two things when setting up your XML sitepmap: what parts of your site should be included and how they should be prioritized.
What to include
Select various parts of your site to be included in your sitemap and exclude others by not selecting them. For example, you might want your blog posts, product feature pages, forums, and testimonials to be included in your sitemap, while leaving out a terms and conditions page.
Excluded elements are still crawled and indexed by search engines and can still appear in search results, but the parts of your site included in the sitemap will be given greater priority, visibiliy and are likely to be updated more frequently and accurately than those not included.
Priority
Anything you include in your XML sitemap is also given a priority - that is, how important you consider it to be in relation to the other things you include in your site map.
Element priority ranges from 1.0 (highest) to 0.0 (lowest), with 0.5 being the default "normal" priority ranking. Any element included at any priority within the XML sitemap will receive more attention from search engines than any excluded element.
For example, you might give your front page the highest priority (1.0) because it features what you want everyone on the web to find and know about you first. And you might leave your site's forums with the default, "normal" priority (0.5), and give your menus an vene lower priority.
When in doubt, start with the defaults. You can always refine these settings in the future.
Enable the XML Sitemap module
Select its checkbox on the Modules page and click "Save configuration":
Configure the XML Sitemap module
Go to the XML Sitemap module configuration tab at Configuration > XML Sitemap > Settings or by clicking its "Configure" link on the Modules page.
Custom Domain names
If you use your own, custom domain name for your Drupal Gardens site, you need enter it in the "URL to generate links from" text box. This makes sure that all the links in your XML sitemap are based on your custom domain name.
Settings
Search engine settings
Select the search engines to which you wish to submit your XML sitemap. In most cases, you should submit it to all the available search engines. You can add search engines not included in the default list by clicking the "add more" link and adding their submission URLs.
Frontpage settings
- Priority - See "Element priority" above.
- Change frequency - Set how often your XML sitemap is updated to reflect the contents of your front page. The updates can happen "always" (every time something changes on your front page), hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly. It is a good idea to keep your XML site map up-to-date, especially if you have a very dynamic site, however, your updated XML sitemap will be resubmitted to the search engines at most once per day.
Menu Settings
Include one or more of your site's menus and prioritize them in your XML sitemap.
Content settings
Include one or more content types of your choice and prioritize them in your XML sitemap.
For example, you may wish to include and prioritize your press releases and blog posts, while leaving out other types of content from your sitemap. Note: search engines will still crawl and index material on your site that is not included in the XML sitemap.
Taxonomy settings
Include taxonomy vocabularies from your site and/or your site forums (forums are included here because they are organized as terms within a taxonomy vocabulary) and prioritize them in your XML sitemap. You can only include vocabularies as a whole (all terms in tags, forums, etc.), not specific terms or sections.
Permissions
Go to the Permissions tab at People > Permissions or click the XML Sitemap module's "Permissions" link on the Modules page.
Administer XML sitemap settings - No one but the site maintainer and/or administrator needs access to these settings in most cases. Normal site visitors and site members certainly should not be given this permission.
