working with technology

I wrote an article about the xml sitemap drupal before here. You might want to read it before reading this article. Drupal 's xml sitemap module provide more feature than just providing only submiting the main url for the website. Another important feature you could consider is to submit all your article(nodes) to search engine for better index for your web site.

After enabling the 'XML sitemap node' feature, the previous nodes(articles) will be written to the sitemap after the next execution of the cron job. We could see this easily looking at the sitemap.

Before enabling the 'sitemap node', the sitemap looks like this:

http://iniu.net/sitemap.xml

After enable 'sitemap node', the sitemap xml file will be devided into two file with names :

http://iniu.net/sitemap-0.xml and http://iniu.net/sitemap-1.xml

The main sitemap sitemap-0.xml is just the information of the last updated time and the content change frequency of our main url. for example, for our website, the sitemap-0.xml should looks like

http://iniu.net/ 2009-08-19T06:58:50Z hourly

It is just information for seach engine of what the main page of our website is modified and notify the search to index the main page of our website when neccessary.

The xml sitemap node url submit feature will provide more information of each node information of our website.

These node url is stored in another xml file(sitemap-1.xml) generated by drupal, just use browser to open that sitemap, we could see all our article url listed in the following format:

http://iniu.net/content/setting-drupal-xml-sitemap-google 2009-08-19T06:51:31Z always 0.5
http://iniu.net/content/host-multiple-website-using-only-one-web-hosting-account 2009-08-19T06:23:09Z always 0.5
http://iniu.net/content/configure-amazon-module-drupal 2009-08-19T04:50:13Z hourly 0.5
http://iniu.net/content/drupal-link-package-module-centralize-internal-and-external-website-link-management

...

It is just more detail information for search engine to determinde what is on our website and when does the website be modified. And by submiting this file to search engine, It 's not surprise that our website will get better index!