general sitemap question

Hi everyone I have a working sitemap for my forum in the /forum directory, and a working sitemap for my blog in the /blog directory.

Is there a way I can combine both of these sitemaps for the root directory and submit that to google? thanks.

Hello Justin,

vBSEO SItemap Generator allows to you to include non-vbulletin URLs in sitemap - you should just insert them into extra-urls.txt file.

I'm sorry but I need some additional clarification. It is my understanding that the page rank value I am receiving from vbseo is for the ROIC :: Phil Town & Rule #1, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham Value Investment Community directory - is it not? Or does the page rank value go directly to the top level domain at ROIC :: Phil Town & Rule #1, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham Value Investment Community ?

If I include the nonvbseo URL (the blog sitemap) into vbseo sitemap generator, will my root directory at ROIC :: Phil Town & Rule #1, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham Value Investment Community get the page rank value for it?

or will the page rank for my forums go to the /forum directory and the the blog page rank go to the /blog directory?

Basically I dont understand if the page rank value goes to the top domain or not :(

Hello Justin,

sitemap is not directly related to page rank value. You can include non-vBulletin pages in sitemap by adding them in extra-urls.txt file, but you will have to setup sitemap in domain root in this case: Sitemap in www root

I think I have it now.

I now only have 1 website in my google sitemaps, and that is my ROIC :: Phil Town & Rule #1, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham Value Investment Community domain. I am assuming that a proper sitemap submitted for that domain will index the contents of both my /blog and /forum subdomains.

I created a robots.txt file in root, here are the contents:

PHP Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: forum/ajax.php
Disallow: forum/attachment.php
Disallow: forum/calendar.php
Disallow: forum/cron.php
Disallow: forum/editpost.php
Disallow: forum/global.php
Disallow: forum/image.php
Disallow: forum/inlinemod.php
Disallow: forum/joinrequests.php
Disallow: forum/login.php
Disallow: forum/member.php
Disallow: forum/misc.php
Disallow: forum/moderator.php
Disallow: forum/newattachment.php
Disallow: forum/newreply.php
Disallow: forum/newthread.php
Disallow: forum/online.php
Disallow: forum/poll.php
Disallow: forum/postings.php
Disallow: forum/printthread.php
Disallow: forum/private.php
Disallow: forum/profile.php
Disallow: forum/register.php
Disallow: forum/report.php
Disallow: forum/reputation.php
Disallow: forum/search.php
Disallow: forum/sendmessage.php
Disallow: forum/showgroups.php
Disallow: forum/spiders.php
Disallow: forum/subscription.php
Disallow: forum/threadrate.php
Disallow: forum/usercp.php
Disallow: forum/usernote.php
Disallow: forum/admincp/
Disallow: forum/cgi-bin/
Disallow: forum/includes/
Disallow: forum/install/
Disallow: forum/ioncube/
Disallow: forum/mint/
Disallow: forum/modcp/
Disallow: forum/memberlist.php 


I also have a robots.txt in my /forum subdirectory, with the same contents minus the /forum part for each disallow rule. I wasn't sure if this would be necessary or not?

My sitemap is located in the root directory. Here is the contents of my .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(sitemap.*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ /forum/vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]
RewriteCond &#37;{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>


I've also included the full path to my blog sitemap in the extra urls.txt file.

So I think I may have it, but if you woudn't mind giving it the "once over" to make sure I didn't screw something up I'd be much obliged.

Hello Justin,

1. Entries in robots.txt should have a leading slash, like:

Code:

Disallow: /forum/ajax.php

2. you don't need robots.txt in forum/ folder, it should be in domain root only.

3. "Sitemap files URL" setting in sitemap generator options should be changed to

Code:

http://www.roicommunity.com/

4. You should not add links to xml sitemap in extra-urls.txt, only the regular links, like your blog homepage and blog posts.

Hi Oleg, thank you for responding to my question.

#4 - so in other words every time I write a blog entry that I want to make sure gets crawled, I need to add it to the extra urls list.txt individually? I hope I am misunderstanding you because that seems like an awful lot of work!

You can create separate sitemap for your blog (I believe there is a sitemap generator for wordpress).