Question Sitemap.xml

I just installed and started using the program and so far so good.
I used PHPGedView a few years ago, but haven't used anything for a long time.
One of the things that helped when I had the site running back then was people who found it via web searches, who then were able to give me more information and I made email contact with distant family. I would think that is a large part of why many of us post our family history online, on the off chance that somebody finds it and can expand it.
To that end I suggest adding a sitemap.xml to the base directory and keeping it updated.The sitemap would contain only the information publicly viewable, that the web crawler probably would hit anyhow, but it serves as a tool to help the search engines log it. Most of the big search engines look for the sitemap.xml so I think it would help search results and generate more help for peole who want it.
A secondary help would be a way of submitting the site to Google's Webmaster Tools, which is normally done via adding a Meta tag to the header. If there was a way of copy/pasting the Meta tag the Tools site gives you to a configuration page that puts it in the header, you could then verify the site with Google's Webmaster Tools.
Both need to be optional, so those who don't want to use a sitemap.xml wouldn't get one generated.
I am not sure how complex it would be to add, there is a Wordpress Sitemap plugin that seems to do it quickly and easily enough, and the PHP code should be enough to help whomever would want to take this on. It is obviously more complex with this since there are more privacy concerns, but I think for the most part I think it could at the very least a module.
The same page that configures the sitemap.xml could also configure the robots.txt, so that if you don't want the robots indexing Media for example you could exempt them from that without having to manually create a robots.txt file.
That is basically all I have. A couple minor SEO tweaks. Otherwise so far the program seems well suited to what I was looking for. I have one more thing to test on it, but that may not be for a while (basically testing another unrelated Gedcom and how it handles having them both so visitors can easily find which Family they are interested in).

Brian,
Could you try the Sitemap module?

BrianAT wrote:

A secondary help would be a way of submitting the site to Google's Webmaster Tools, which is normally done via adding a Meta tag to the header. If there was a way of copy/pasting the Meta tag the Tools site gives you to a configuration page that puts it in the header, you could then verify the site with Google's Webmaster Tools.

You will need to copy/paste the Meta tag to the header.php file of each theme you plan to have active on your site. I don't know how important it is for your users to be able to change themes, but if its not, then I would recommend you remove any you don't want to use. Then there's only one file to update.

For sitemap, wooc is correct. The module already exists. It avoids the rest of us having clutter we don't want or need. However, I'm not sure any of the development team use it, so we can't guarantee its working perfectly. If you find any problems please file a bug report.

Please don't forget though, as stated in various places here, webtrees is not yet released for live sites. We are aiming for a late August release date, but until then, help for users is limited. Help for testers though is warmly welcomed )

webtrees comes with a comprehensive robots.txt file, but this is obviously only of use if you have access to the root directory of your domain.

Even if you just submit the index page to a search engine, webtrees will generate links to the the individual/family lists, and from there to the individual/family pages. Thus the search engines will find all the pages that they are allowed to see.

webtrees generates special pages for search engines (e.g. does not use ajax for anything that the search engine needs to see).

IMHO, there is little to be gained from a sitemap.xml, except perhaps, the "last change" and "update frequency" info. I'm not sure whether any search engines actually care about these two.

The existing sitemap module doesn't compress files, and doesn't split files larger than the maximum permitted size (50000 links), so is not much use on larger sites.

It is also quite slow, as it needs to run a privacy check on every record in the system, and often times out before completing.

It needs a bit of a re-think, but since webtrees is already quite friendly towards search engines, this is not a high priority.