Easing GoogleBots life

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Easing GoogleBots life

updated by rck, 2006-05-02

Googlebot the well-known crawler. A while ago, a new beta program of Google started. Google Sitemaps. There, Webmasters can upload sitemaps of their sites. Thus, pages not even linked properly can be made accessible to Googlebot easier.

Uploading happens with a well-defined XML format, which is specified on the Google Sitemaps homepage. I made a little php program to generate such sitemaps automatically out of the installation of a phpWebSite. You can even specify multiple phpWebSites on the same server and let the program generate a site map for each.

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Google Sitemap
First, you need to register with Google Sitemap. Then, you can claim the sites you've specified there by uploading a special file made available through your Google Sitemap instance. As soon as you've claimed your web directory, you can upload you gzipped sitemap file and that's it. If the site changes, you can upload the file again. Those steps can all be automated, even the notification of new content.

Google Sitemap

First, you need to register with Google Sitemap. Then, you can claim the sites you've specified there by uploading a special file made available through your Google Sitemap instance.

As soon as you've claimed your web directory, you can upload you gzipped sitemap file and that's it. If the site changes, you can upload the file again. Those steps can all be automated, even the notification of new content.

Installation
First, download sitemap_0.1.0.tar.gz(7997). After untar/gzipping it, you will notice two directories inside a folder called "tools". "inc" contains the configuration, specify your sites here. "sitemap" contains the actual script. It is called "index.php", so calling this directory directly calls the script as well. Unpack this directory right into your installation directory of phpwebsite. If your installation is in /home/yourname/pws/, put all the directories in /home/yourname/pws/tools/. Next, change "all_sites.php" in the directory inc. I've included a sample-file, it shows you the needed parameter. All of your sites are stored in a "$sites" array, which is pretty generic. It contains a path, caption and the boolean super_short for every site. Path tells the sitemap script, where your phpWebSite installation is. It will take the database configuration from there as well as the web-path. caption is, how you refer to your site later on when calling the script on the command-line. And super_short is special. It means "use a special form of the mod_rewrite hack". Usually, you'd want to leave this false.

Installation

First, download sitemap_0.1.0.tar.gz(7997). After untar/gzipping it, you will notice two directories inside a folder called "tools". "inc" contains the configuration, specify your sites here. "sitemap" contains the actual script. It is called "index.php", so calling this directory directly calls the script as well.

Unpack this directory right into your installation directory of phpwebsite. If your installation is in /home/yourname/pws/, put all the directories in /home/yourname/pws/tools/.

Next, change "all_sites.php" in the directory inc. I've included a sample-file, it shows you the needed parameter. All of your sites are stored in a "$sites" array, which is pretty generic. It contains a path, caption and the boolean super_short for every site.

Path tells the sitemap script, where your phpWebSite installation is. It will take the database configuration from there as well as the web-path. caption is, how you refer to your site later on when calling the script on the command-line. And super_short is special. It means "use a special form of the mod_rewrite hack". Usually, you'd want to leave this false.

1 | 2 | 3

Google Sitemap
Running the Script
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