Creating a Google Sitemap For Your Joomla! Site

What is a Google sitemap? A Google sitemap is an xml file containing a list of the URLs on your site, in a very precise format. The Google robot uses it as a tool to navigate your site. If there are URLs on your site that are hard to reach but which contain important site content then including one on your site may improve your Google ranking.

The easiest way to create one is to use an online sitemap generator. If you try Googling the search term online sitemap generator you will get a substantial list of sites offering this service for free.

However I have found that there are some issues involved in generating a sitemap for a Joomla site using this kind of service. Joomla sites often have a complex menu structure, with important content pages located several clicks away from the home page. Many popular sitemap generators seem to have problems adequately crawling a Joomla site. For example, I found that one popular and widely advertised sitemap generator only managed to index seven pages from my own site which contains around 100 pages!

If you want a sitemap for your Joomla site, the important thing is to try several, and then to check that they are actually indexing your pages correctly. You can do this quite easily by opening up the generated sitemap.xml file in a text editor such as Windows notepad.

Even if you do not know any xml, you should find the contents quite straightforward to understand. You should see a long list of Url tags, each of which contain a short list of inner tags, including loc tags. The page URLs or your site are contained within the loc tags, a quick check through them will show whether your pages are being properly indexed.

It is important to remember though that a sitemap is merely advisory, and is not normally essential. A few years ago it was the case that Google often only looked at a few pages on a site, and including a sitemap could make a substantial difference to your Google ranking, by making it easier to crawl. These days the Google robot does a very good job of crawling even very complex sites, and can index most URLs, even those containing complex query strings, so it is doubtful whether a sitemap makes a large difference. However even making a small difference with your Google ranking is worthwhile, so it is worth doing if you can.

Once you have generated a satisfactory sitemap, you need to upload it to your site, to the www root folder of your site. The you need to notify Google. You can do this by signing up for an account with Google Webmaster Tools and submitting your sitemap. This is highly recommended, as Google offer a variety of useful diagnostic tools that can help you to improve the ranking of your site.

However a quick shortcut is to type the following into the address bar of your web browser.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

replacing yoursite.com with the URL of your site. You should receive a notification message saying that the notification has been received.