Scott Hanselman

Google Sitemaps

August 22, 2006 Comment on this post [11] Posted in ASP.NET | DasBlog
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ScottongoogleI just checked in support for generation of Google Sitemaps directly from DasBlog. Omar anticipates a release this week. We also have a continuous integration build going internally thanks to Paul van Brenk so we may be able to have always-fresh" releases soon (remember to back up your stuff and manually merge the httpHandlers section of your web.config). We also will have an AJAX-based "autosave draft" feature as well thanks to Steven Rockarts and Justice Gray.

NOTE: The daily builds from Paul are DAILY BUILDS. They are not the official release. We'll release the final one SourceForge. However, I'm ALWAYS running the daily build on this blog, so it's pretty baked. Upgrading is just copying a few new files and merging your web.config.
UPDATE: Daily Builds of DasBlog are at
http://dasblog.info/dbftp/

If you haven't yet, go log into Google Webmaster Tools and check out what Google knows about your site. It includes a robots.txt validator and lets you know what keywords folks are using to get to your site.

Google sitemaps are very simple and a pretty good idea, I think. It lets me, as a blog publisher, provide a great deal of context and "freshness" data to Google that I have stored (trapped) inside the blog.

Sure, arguably they could get a lot of that information by gleaning it from If-Modified-Since headers, but this is such a simple format, why NOT do it?

Here's an example snippet. The lastmod element can include time detail as well, but I think date is enough for blog purposes. The priority is pretty much relative. In this case, the home page is more important than a post and a comments page is less important than a post page.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsd="
http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/default.aspx</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/archives.aspx</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CommentView.aspx?...</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.hanselman.com/blog/FinePrintChangesTheWayIPrint.aspx</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.9</priority>
    <lastmod>2006-08-22</lastmod>
  </url>
....SNIP....

Aside, I had no idea I was the 3rd (or so) Scott if you search just for "Scott" on Google One day I'll crush Scott Fly Rods, but until that day, it's the Bronze for me. ;)

I also encourage folks to "sesha iWeb" with Google ngaisiZulu. ;)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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August 22, 2006 11:41
Bertrand posted a cool HttpHandler that supports automatically generating a Google SiteMap from your configured ASP.NET 2.0 Site Navigation provider. You can download the source code and use it for free here: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2005/12/02/432188.aspx

Hope this helps,

Scott
August 22, 2006 12:30
You're in second place if you use www.google.se :)
August 22, 2006 16:58
Scott, how do you compute your update frequency and priority values?
August 22, 2006 23:32
Scott, the release this week, is this the 1.9 release?
August 23, 2006 2:02
"One day I'll crush Scott Fly Rods, but until that day, it's the Bronze for me. ;)"

Be happy you've got the bronze! I have a feeling that its going to take a lot of work before I can even get myself into the top 5 pages on a search for "Justice". ;)
September 01, 2006 1:44
Scott, it looks like you moved up to Silver. Scott Fly Rods just can't compete
September 22, 2006 19:38
Scott,

What is the url of the sitemap ??

Thx .. Ken
October 07, 2006 1:43
Im so glad that this feature was added. Now all dasBlog needs is a tool which forces google to reindex our blogs:>
October 07, 2006 1:44
Ken. The location of the site map is http://[YourDomain]/[BlogLocation]/googlesitemap.ashx
October 07, 2006 1:55
Kevin - Actually we have a tool for that. It's the new Google Sitemap stuff in dasBlog 1.9. Log into the Google Webmaster Tools and point them to http://youblog/blog/googlesitemap.ashx. If you sign up for that you can tell them to reindex.
October 07, 2006 2:18
Scott,
I have a couple of questions about this and I was hoping that you could help since Ive had a hard time getting the facts while searching around:
1. When the Google Site Map changes does it resubmit the sitemap to google so that the sitemap can be downloaded again? Doesnt this require a post to google and not just the contents of googlesitemap.ashx to change?
2. Does frequently updating your sitemap help to have google reindex your site more frequently? Or does it just help them index your site when they go ahead and do so.

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.