Sitemaps are used to map out your website's content for search engine crawlers. They are more than just a basic map of the structure, they can tell the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo how to prioritise pages, howoften you expect your content to change and, indeed, when it last modified.
An up to date and thorough sitemap is proven to increase your chances of ranking higher up in search results and gaining more visitors to your site.
Middleman SEO Sitemap is a customiseable extension for the Middleman static site framework which will automatically publish an accurate sitemap whenever you build your site.
Add this line to your Middleman site's Gemfile:
gem 'middleman-seo_sitemap'And then execute:
bundle
Place the following inside your config.rb:
activate :seo_sitemap, default_host: 'https://example.com'An up to date sitemap will be generated within the build_dir when you run bundle exec middleman build.
Aside from helping identify which pages for search engines should crawl, you can also indicate which pages are more important than others, and how frequently they change.
By default, all pages have a priority of 0.5 (out of 1.0) and a weekly change frequency.
You can change these values by passing in options to the activate directive:
activate :search_engine_sitemap, default_priority: 0.5,
default_change_frequency: "monthly"You can override the priority or change frequency for a particular page by using frontmatter:
---
title: Blog
priority: 1.0
change_frequency: daily
---
Welcome to my blog! This page is particularly important, and changes often.A number between 0.0 and 1.0, representing how important the page is, relative to other pages on your site.
The default value is 0.5.
From sitemaps.org:
Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites–it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers.
Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index.
Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site.
Possible values are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never.
The default value is monthly.
You can add a hide_from_sitemap attribute to your page's frontmatter to omit it from the sitemap:
---
title: My hidden page
hide_from_sitemap: true
---
Shh. Don't tell anyone I'm here.If you would like to use a different frontmatter attribute from hide_from_sitemap, you can specify one in the extension options:
activate :search_engine_sitemap, exclude_attr: 'hidden'This would allow you to use hidden: true in place of hide_from_sitemap: true.
You can also use exclude_if to exclude pages based on more complex requirements. For example:
# Exclude all pages which have a date that's after today
activate :search_engine_sitemap, exclude_if: ->(resource) {
resource.data.date && resource.data.date > Date.today
}The value passed into exclude_if can any object that responds to call.
Sometimes, you might want to alter the URLs that search engines will crawl:
activate :search_engine_sitemap, process_url: -> (url) { url.chomp('/') }The example above would remove a trailing slash from a URL.
The value passed into process_url can any object that responds to call.
- Fork it ( http://github.com/startupheroesuk/middleman-seo_sitemap/fork )
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature') - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature) - Create new Pull Request