Sitemap Generators for the rest of your site (and warning)

The VBSEO Sitemap generator is great -- for your forum. But many of us will also need another program in addition that will make sitemaps for the rest of our website.

What does everyone else use?

I also wanted to give a huge warning about testing these other programs out. I tested one out that apparently (without notice) uses IE's cookies. So as it was crawling my website, it was DELETING comments from my journals and wreaking havoc with the forum! I had to restore from backup even after aborting it 10% in. So I guess the moral is log out of your forum before ever running any type of crawler (besides vbseos's).

-vissa

Hi,
I have the same question. How can other sections of the website be included into the forum sitemap? What other sitemaps generators are recommended?
Thx!

Originally Posted by vissa

The VBSEO Sitemap generator is great -- for your forum. But many of us will also need another program in addition that will make sitemaps for the rest of our website.

What does everyone else use?

I also wanted to give a huge warning about testing these other programs out. I tested one out that apparently (without notice) uses IE's cookies. So as it was crawling my website, it was DELETING comments from my journals and wreaking havoc with the forum! I had to restore from backup even after aborting it 10% in. So I guess the moral is log out of your forum before ever running any type of crawler (besides vbseos's).

-vissa

Do you use abadvanced? They include a file in the addons folder to put the vbadvanced files in the generator

It is possible to use this for all your site urls just talk to them about it and I am sure they can set you up

I have the same question, and no, I don't use vbAdvanced. I have a lot of content that is contained outside of forums. Is there a simple way to integrate these pages?

That's the purpose of the extra-urls.txt file. You can put all other URLs in there and they will be included in your sitemap.

How exactly does this work since this is a plug in to the forum?

I added links to my site with the extra urls file but they were rejected because they were in a higher level directory that my forum.

Create a .htaccess file in the root of your site, and add:

Code:

RewriteRule ^(sitemap.*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ /forums/vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]

(Edit the path if yours isn't /forums/)

Then, in your Google Webmaster account, add your sitemap file(s) pointing to the root of your site, instead of your forums directory.

(And the next release of the Sitemap Generator will support auto-notifying Google using this path instead of your forums path, or you can make these changes now: Google Notification Option)

cant seem to get that to work. It simply keeps adding "forum" into my account and adding the sitemap to that.

Do I need to move my sitemap folder to the root level of my site?

I tried adding the .htaccess code and it still denies my extra-urls because they are in a higher level domain than my sitemap.

No, you don't need to move the folder. That's what the entry in your root .htaccess does. It makes it APPEAR that the sitemap files are in your root.

I have a feeling something with the FrontPage directives in your root .htaccess is interfering.

oh well, not a big deal anyway. All my regular html pages are indexed in google and new ones get noticed and added quickly.

it just always been an issue of getting my forums pages indexed so I will let the sitemap just keep doing its thing.

Thanks.

Hmmmm...... I may give this a try again. I just realized that I had multiple .htaccess files in the root, as well as in the forum root.

Stupid Front Page, I really need to learn how to use something a little more advanced, or actually learn how to do some coding of my own.

edit - no dice. As soon as I put the rewrite rule in there, it disables my front page extensions.

Note to everyone, Front Page Sucks. (but I am sure most of you knew that)

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I have this very question. I have been using vBSEO sitemap for the past few months or so on my forums. It appears to be working well - no complaints. I use Joomla CMS for my main site, but never created a sitemap for it.

Does Google think my site is limited to the sitemap submitted? Am I doing harm by only submitting only the forums sitemap?

Thanks.
Chris

Hello,

I use also Joomla on my website.

I would like to add url of my Joomla CMS to the sitemap of vbulletin.

In your mind is it difficult?

If I have only the sitemap of VBulletin, is there a risk of non indexing on others Joomla pages?

Thanks

David

Hey David-
I haven't heard back yet on this topic. I do like the VBSEO Sitemap, but I fell I'm shortchanging the rest of my site. If you hear anything, I'd love to know more about how to submit by vBulletin and Joomla through the VBSEO sitemap plugin.

-Chris