Text sitemap

by **Shadow** Wed 12 Dec 2007 - 9:43

Text sitemap

Site maps help search engine bots index your site more deeply and push you up in the search engine results.

Step 1

Go through your forum permissions:

Admin panel>>>General>>>Forum>>>Categories and forums and click on the little cross and tick icon Text sitemap Perms

nearby the orange cog.

Go through your list of forums and set any forums you want search engines to index to guests can view the forum and read the topics. This is important for generating a plain text sitemap. Please also make sure you set any forums you do not want indexed to guests cannot view. You can always change this when finished.

Step 2

Go to this site here

Type the main link to your forum in the starting URL box. Leave the rest of the settings as they are and click start. You will have to wait a little while whilst it goes through your site. Once it has finished it will give you a whole page of download links. You want the link for: Download Sitemap in Text Format. Click it and save to your computer.

Step 3

You now need to go into your saved file by opening it with your notepad or wordpad in windows. Highlight it all and copy it.

Step 4 - The Boring Part

Go into your admin panel>>>Modules>>>HTML Pages Management>>>Create New HTML page. Call it sitemap and where it says: Do you wish to use your forum’s page header and page footer? select NO. Thats very important.

In the HTML page box below, paste up your copied site map. Here comes the dullest part of the job. You need to go through your links and if any of them have: login forum?=redirect in the address/URL remove it, as this means you have not set your permissions right and its picked up on a forum its not allowed into. You then need to start from the top and you will notice every link ends in .htm or htm#numbers. After every htm, you need to add this tag:   (not in bold) Its quickest to do one, then highlight and copy the tag, then just right click and paste for all your other links. This is time consuming and dull but it has to be done! You should eventually have a load of links that look something like this:

Code:: http://www.pregnancy2parenting.net/ http://www.pregnancy2parenting.net/index.htm http://www.pregnancy2parenting.net/first-trimester-f45/when-are-people-having-there-12-week-scan-t1446-30.htm#53997 http://www.pregnancy2parenting.net/first-trimester-f45/

but a lot longer! Click preview once done. You should see a white page with a URL per line. If there are any URLS not seperated you have missed out the tag somewhere, go back and edit. Once done, save the html page.

Step 5

Once saved click HTML pages management in the left admin panel HTML menu. You will see a list of your HTML pages and the link URLs. Yours will look a little like this:

Code:: http://your forums address/sitemap-h1.html

THIS NEXT BIT IS IMPORTANT! If you have a custom domain name (.com, .co.uk etc) then the link URL will still be showing your old domain address. When using your link to your site map for submitting to search engines, you should change your old address to your domain name address. For example, my old domain is:

Code:: http://p2pg.free-boards.net/sitemap-h1.html

but i would submit the link above like this:

Code:: http://pregnancy2parenting.net/sitemap-h1.html (with my custom domain name)

This ensures the address that will show in google etc will be your custom one, more professional looking.

Step 6

Now you have the URL to your site map, you can now submit it to the many site submissions available on the net. If you are stuck for ideas, on the homepage of your admin panel in the top roght hand side, are some site syou can submit to. Make sure its your site map you have submitted and not your forums normal address. Your site map will contain your forums normal address.

Thats it! However the downside is a plain text site map does not update, but i dont believe forumotion is capable of handling any other type. Considering that fact that i know of no other free forum provider that you can have any form of site map on, let alone a text one...i think its definately worth doing. As the text site map does not automotically updae, i would suggest choosing only the forums that directly relate to your sites subject and once a month redoing and submitting your text sitemap.