Google sitemaps

Posted At : 8 April 2006 09:47 | Posted By : Lucas Sherwood
Related Categories: ColdFusion

I have been spending a few days working with getting Google sitemaps set up all over the place to help with our overall SEO efforts.

So why would you do this? Why create another file just for google. Well it really isn't that hard and the tradeoff is great, You get feedback from google as to what happens during its crawl.

How hard is it? Not so hard at all, here is a little snippet of our sitemap that lists the unique URLs to every single product page we have.

<cfsetting showdebugoutput="false">
<cfscript>
    oPM = createObject("component","core.productManager");
    qProducts = oPM.searchProducts(countryCode=application.countryCode,publish=1,returnFields="productCode");
</cfscript>
<cfcontent type="text/xml" reset="yes"><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
    http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
    <cfoutput query="qProducts">
        <url><loc>/experience/#qProducts.productCode#</loc></url>
    </cfoutput>
</urlset>

Nothing too hard there?

So does it help? Well I am running two nice test cases at the moment. I have just launched a new blog for my boss and so far, it is not linked from anywhere at all, all I have done to promote it is tell google about its sitemap file (thanks ray, the sitemap file in blogCFC helped out there) and we will see how we go.