Sitemaps

A good SEO technique for helping Search Engines index your website is to tell them where the can find all your content using Sitemaps. Sitemaps are basic xml documents but they can be tedious to maintain manually, more so for database-driven dynamic websites.

The SitemapFeature reduces the effort required by letting you add Site Urls to a .NET collection of SitemapUrl POCO's. In its most basic usage you can populate a single Sitemap with urls of your Website Routes, e.g:

Plugins.Add(new SitemapFeature
{
    UrlSet = db.Select<TechnologyStack>()
    .ConvertAll(x => new SitemapUrl {
        Location = new ClientTechnologyStack { Slug = x.Slug }.ToAbsoluteUri(),
        LastModified = x.LastModified,
        ChangeFrequency = SitemapFrequency.Weekly,
    })
});

The above example uses OrmLite to generate a collection of SitemapUrl entries containing Absolute Urls for all techstacks.io Technology Pages. This is another good showcase for the Reverse Routing available on Request DTO's which provides a Typed API for generating Urls without any additional effort.

Once populated your sitemap will be available at /sitemap.xml which looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
  <loc>http://techstacks.io/the-guardian</loc>
  <lastmod>2015-01-14</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
...
</urlset>

Which you can checkout in this live Sitemap example.

Multiple Sitemap Indexes

For larger websites, Sitemaps also support multiple Sitemap indexes which lets you split sitemap urls across multiple files. To take advantage of this in SitemapFeature you would instead populate the SitemapIndex collection with multiple Sitemap entries. An example of this is in the full Sitemap used by techstacks.io:

Plugins.Add(new SitemapFeature {
SitemapIndex = {
    new Sitemap {
        AtPath = "/sitemap-techstacks.xml",
        LastModified = DateTime.UtcNow,
        UrlSet = db.Select<TechnologyStack>()
        .Map(x => new SitemapUrl {
            Location = new ClientTechnologyStack {Slug=x.Slug}.ToAbsoluteUri(),
            LastModified = x.LastModified,
            ChangeFrequency = SitemapFrequency.Weekly,
        }),
    },
    new Sitemap {
        AtPath = "/sitemap-technologies.xml",
        LastModified = DateTime.UtcNow,
        UrlSet = db.Select<Technology>()
        .Map(x => new SitemapUrl {
            Location = new ClientTechnology {Slug = x.Slug}.ToAbsoluteUri(),
            LastModified = x.LastModified,
            ChangeFrequency = SitemapFrequency.Weekly,
        })
    },
    new Sitemap
    {
        AtPath = "/sitemap-users.xml",
        LastModified = DateTime.UtcNow,
        UrlSet = db.Select<CustomUserAuth>()
        .Map(x => new SitemapUrl {
            Location = new ClientUser {UserName = x.UserName}.ToAbsoluteUri(),
            LastModified = x.ModifiedDate,
            ChangeFrequency = SitemapFrequency.Weekly,
        })
    }
}});

Which now generates the following <sitemapindex/> at /sitemap.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
  <loc>http://techstacks.io/sitemap-techstacks.xml</loc>
  <lastmod>2015-01-15</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
  <loc>http://techstacks.io/sitemap-technologies.xml</loc>
  <lastmod>2015-01-15</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
  <loc>http://techstacks.io/sitemap-users.xml</loc>
  <lastmod>2015-01-15</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

With each entry linking to the urlset for each Sitemap:

• techstacks.io/sitemap-techstacks.xml
• techstacks.io/sitemap-technologies.xml
• techstacks.io/sitemap-users.xml