You can output the Sitemap in three different formats:

• "Tree" view where the Sitemap is formatted similarly to your Rapidweaver project.
• "Alphabet" view where you arrange pages by the alphabet. The default is the English Alphabet (A-Z) but you can define your own alphabet and even re-arrange letters or group multiple letters together.
• "Category" view. This is the most under appreciated view but perhaps the most powerful. With this view you assign each page a series of categories and the Sitemap is shown by category. This is a great way to create a custom sitemap that only shows certain pages or shows a page twice if you are trying to steer someone to the most helpful sight (for instance your contact me page could be under 'help' as well as 'about us')

For each of the views you can select either a single or dual column mode. If you chose two column mode sitemap will try to create balanced columns while not splitting up a view across columns (e.g. it will keep all of the category in a category view in the same colum)

Finally if you add a description to the site you can optionally turn on or off descriptions.

yes -- There is an extensive manual for SiteMap. Grab it here.

It only shows web sites where you haven't changed the default title, filename or folder name....

Easy... Type new ones in the table! (or you can go to the site inspector for that page)... They both work (although I find the table to be faster!)

One of the sitemap's you can create is by category. Let's say you have pages on fish, ducks and ponds. You may tag some things with category 'fish' and 'ponds' while others are 'ducks' and 'ponds'... Each category will show that page. To enter them just type them in per page one at a time hitting return between each one.

sitemap.xml is a file that search engines used to better index your site. It gives you the chance to specific relative importance of pages in your site as well as give hints to search engines on how often they change, etc. There is no guarantee that the search engine will actually listen to your hints but in general it seems to help provide more accurate searches.

As of April, 2007 Google, Yahoo and ask.com will read the sitemap.xml file

For everything you ever wanted to know about sitemaps go to http://www.sitemaps.org

Each search engine has it's own particular way;

Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters
Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

however a more generic way to catch 'all' engines is to include it in the robots.txt file. Starting April 11, 2007 3 top search engines (google, yahoo, ask) will 'autodiscover' the sitemap.xml file (http://blog.ask.com/2007/04/sitemaps_autodi.html))

Simply put the text

Sitemap: [ull url to your sitemap]

Anywhere in your robots.txt file.

For instance at Loghound.com the robots.txt looks like this

Sitemap: http://www.loghound.com/sitemap.xml

You can verify this by looking at it here http://www.loghound.com/robots.txt

For more information read this http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php#informing

(Thanks to the resident SEO expert, Mark Notz, for his help in keeping up with sitemap events)

Make sure you are placing the sitemap.xml file in the 'root' directory. Starting with version 1.52 of sitemap this is really easy, just enable the option and it will be automatically placed there.



Previous to 1.52 you had to do this move manually which was painful. If you still feel the need to do it manually continue reading below...

You need to make sure it's in the 'Root' directory of your site... Sadly there is no way to do this within a plugin right now so you have to either copy it over manually (yes, I know, a pain) or if you have shell access you can set up a symbolic link at the root to point to the version saved in the "files" directory under the sitemap.

I've put together a small screencast that shows how the three different approaches work (15MB, 10 minutes). you can view the screencast here

That tells google what priority you think the pages should be. Note that this is priority within your own page, not against someone else and the priority is all relative.. If you use this feature try to be balanced (e.g. make some low and some high) otherwise it won't do anything. The way I use it is I make my main 'entry' pages high priority so google should tend to prefer those

Simple. It removes the site from sitemap.xml AND it puts a 'ROBOTS=NONE' in your metadata to prevent search engines from crawling that page.

There are four output options that can be a little confusing




The first one simply tells sitemap to not include pages that you 'hide' in your sidebar menu (using the RapidWeaver page inspector) -- If you do this or not is purely a matter of choice but one implication is that selecting this option means that these pages will be excledud from your HTML sitemap as well as sitemap.xml. This one is hit or miss - Some like it on, some like it off.

The second option comes into play based on the disable search button under the 'search engine' tab -- When this option is on and you specifically exclude a site from your sitemap in the search engines tab SiteMap will also insert a small snippit of code into the page itself telling any search engine who comes across this page to not index it. If you turn it off then sitemap will not insert the extra snippit of code so if a search engine happens to stumble upon sites that you excluded from your sitemap.xml it will stll index it. It's a little hard to explain but for most people if they go to the trouble of actually removing a page from the sitemap.xml they (usually) don't want the page indexed so Most users probably want this on.

The third one is useful if you have more than one sitemap page. If you have two or more pages selecting this means the sitemap pages share settings (which pages to hide/index, etc.) Most users probably want this off.

The fourth one is to let SiteMap create 'absolute' references in the HTML page (this has no effect on the xml page for google). Normally sitemap creates links to pages relative to itself (e.g. ../page1/page1.html) but selecting this option has sitemap create links that are fully qualified (e.g. http://yoursite/page1/page.html) Normally you'll want to keep this off as it makes the page less portable but in some situations (such as if you import a page into another page) this can be handy. Most users probably want this off.