Sitemaps help search engines to better understand the Joomla! site structure and also help crawlers to easier discover fresh content.
Generating your XML Sitemap for Joomla! has never been easier with RSSeo!Enable canonicalization first
Before submitting the sitemap to search engines, enable canonicalization to avoid errors in sitemap.
Is this step important?
Canonicalization is active when a permanent redirect exists from mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com (or viceversa), so when a user types in the browser the name of your site without www in the front, he will be redirected to the www version.
If canonicalization is not enabled, both versions of the site will be indexed with AND without www, because search engines don't know which one to pick, decreasing your search engine rank.
Possible errors
When you submit the Joomla! sitemap without enabling the canonicalization first, Webmasters Tools will display:
"Paths don't match: We've detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that doesn't include the www prefix."
In case you just did that, delete the submitted sitemap, enable canonicalization and add a new sitemap. If you do not know how to enable canonicalization, read the following article: Solve the most common cause of duplicate content in Joomla!
2 more things to do before generating the Joomla! sitemap...
In the backend Joomla! panel head to Components -> RSSeo! -> Sitemap Generator.
You must make sure that:
- you have created 2 empty xml files and save them as sitemap.xml and ror.xml in the root directory of your website
- change the file permissions (make the files writable, temporary, until you have completed generating the sitemap)
Now, you can click the "Generate Sitemap" button.
The sitemap is ready to be submitted to search engines and you can check them at:
http://www.***.com/sitemap.xml and http://www.***.com/ror.xml
Also, you can check our video tutorial about generating Joomla! sitemaps with RSSeo! or test the seo extension on the RSJoomla! demo server.
