Sitemap is used to tell search engines about the pages in your site, their relative importance to each other, and how often they are updated. HTML sitemaps are designed for the user to help them find content on the page. It is a mean to help visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

fwSitemap Component is a Joomla! 1.5 and 2.5 component that lets you create such sitemaps for Joomla based sites.

fwSitemap Component lets you:

• Create an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines to help them crawl your website better.
• Create a Text sitemap to have a plain list of all your pages.
• Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
• Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your site.

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users.

Google introduced Google Sitemaps so web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites. The Sitemap files contains URLs to these pages so that web crawlers can find them. Bing, Google, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol.

Since Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protoco, having a Sitemap lets the search engines have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, a Sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site.

More information defining the field operations and other Sitemap options are defined at http://www.sitemaps.org (Sitemaps.org: Google, Inc., Yahoo, Inc., and Microsoft Corporation)

See also Robots.txt, which can be used to identify sitemaps on the server.

Requirements

• Joomla! 1.5.19 (stable or any later version)
• PHP 5.2 (or any later version)

Installation in Joomla!1.5:

• Extensions » Install/Uninstall » Select the file to install » Upload File & Install.
• Componentns » fwSitemap.

Sitemap generation

Generating a sitemap using the fwSitemap component is as easy as follows.

Start site crawling

Under the list of site's pages tab, you have to select the "Start crawling" link to launch the site crawling process.

When crawling is finished you can see the list of found pages, listed by alphabetical order.

File generation

To generate sitemaps, select the "Deploy" button, on top of page.

You have the choice to generate a XML sitemap that can be submitted to major search engines, or a more standardized format that is the ror format.

HTML format can be used directly within your site.

Those files must be deployed on the server by the administrator. There is no automatic file creation with this component for now.