News articles in XML sitemap (Sitemap Made Simple)

[katea]

well this worked for me...

Code: Select all

{capture assign='junk'}{Blogs numentries="10000"}{/capture}
{foreach from=$items item=entry}
{assign var=utmpBLOGS value=$entry->entryurl|replace:'//':'/51/'|replace:'http:/51':'http:/'}
<url>
  <loc>{$utmpBLOGS}</loc>
  <lastmod>{$entry->time|date_format:"%Y-%m-%d"}</lastmod>
<priority>{$page->priority}</priority>
  <changefreq>{$page->frequency}</changefreq>
</url>
{/foreach}

just replace 51 with the page you want it to land on...

That's worked brilliantly ....

Thanks Jeremy, really appreciated!!

[JeremyBASS]

glad it worked, helping is karam for the soul... for what it's worth that was in a lower link...

http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... #msg133319

there is more there... Cheers
Jeremy

[katea]

glad it worked, helping is karam for the soul... for what it's worth that was in a lower link...

http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... #msg133319

there is more there... Cheers
Jeremy

I did read that link ... And tried the code, but for some reason it didn't work ... But the above code you had worked great.

Oh, and I retract my earlier statement that the News worked great, it didn't ... I didn't notice the // that it produced again ...

However, using your snazzy code from the other link worked great ... It need the replace attribute ...

Thanks again Jeremy

Actually, one thing ... Is it really nescessary to have  /1/68, /2/68/ /3/68/ etc ..... Isn't the 68 redundant?

It doesn't really matter a great deal, but first you have the article number /1/ and also you have the article title itself... So it seems that /1/68/ really only needs to be /1/ ..... I was thinking about just needing the titles, but then you'd have issues with duplicate content.

[JeremyBASS]

of "1/68"  the "68" is the page it goes to... "1" is the articel that gets showed on that page.. so you need 68 or that link would not work.. producing a 404

[JeremyBASS]

It doesn't really matter a great deal, but first you have the article number /1/ and also you have the article title itself... So it seems that /1/68/ really only needs to be /1/ ..... I was thinking about just needing the titles, but then you'd have issues with duplicate content.

Also all of this is to keep from having "duplicate content" issues... your telling google what the corect pages are... so if they find a duplicate content then the will go by the site map's link...

Hope that helps
Cheers
Jeremy

[calguy1000]

Actually, one thing ... Is it really nescessary to have  /1/68, /2/68/ /3/68/ etc ..... Isn't the 68 redundant?

This has been answered lots of times before, but one more won't hurt.

the 1 is the news article id... it's needed so that the system can find the correct news article, because article titles can be duplicated.
the 2 is the page id that the content sits on.  This is needed so that the system can find the right page, and therefore load the right template, and therefore all the other stuff that you want on the page.  Now, there 'COULD' be a preference to eliminate this one variable in the URL, but it would prevent you from having various categories of news displayed on different pages, etc.  so it's kinda important for those sites that are segregating their news articles by category (or other things) into different pages.

[katea]

I can see where you're coming from, of course, there is a duplicate content issue ..

http://www.calguyrocks.com/1/68/learning-french.html

But would it not be possible to drop the 68 (or whatever number) and have it read your blog/news category name ...?

It's like categories in the Blogs ... If I have a category called 'languages'. then theoretically speaking could we not replace the 68 with languages:

http://www.calguyrocks.com/1/languages/ ... rench.html

It knows to put 68 there, so can it not draw the content from the category name and place it accordingly?

The idea of categories is to segregate content obviously, but should we create another article, then like in the blogs, we could use the dropdown to place that article in the category we'd like ... In this case languages ....

Oh, and instead of the blog creating an article holding page like:

http://www.calguyrocks/BlogCategory/1/68/languages.html

maybe those categories can automatically generate an index.html giving us:

http://www.calguyrocks/BlogCategory/1/l ... index.html

Or better still:

http://www.calguyrocks/languages/1/index.html

And our article would be:

http://www.calguyrocks/languages/1/learning-french.html

It would of course be nice to lose the '1' also, but this clearly is important if someone does create an article with the same name (The only way around that of course would be some kind of javascript error message informing that that article name has been taken ....)

Now I've no idea how much work would go into this, but I think it would work much better, for SEO (let's face it, a good CMS is SEO friendly ... As is CMSMS) ... No-one search for BlogCategory, or for numbers, so if this could be done this would be an awesome improvement.

Don't get me wrong, I love CMSMS, I love the News and Blogs, awesome work Calguy, but it would be nice if it could be a little more SEO friendly and customisable...

[calguy1000]

I've had extensive discussions about this with various experts, and on this forum and I have learned three major things:

The first thing:
THE URL IS IRRELEVANT.   GOOGLE DOESN"T CARE.
   unless of course it has a whole bunch of ?this=that&something=somethingelse&a=1&c=6&d=7  making for a very long URL in which case google downgrades the scoring a tad.
For SEO purposes as long as there are some meaningful keywords on the URL that cooperate with the content of the page, you're golden.

WRT news, setting the detailpage parameter when you call news... i.e {news category='foo' detailpage='news-details'}
will generate urls like news/5/98/news-article-title.html (depending of course on your configuration), which google is perfectly happy with.

The only other problem is duplicated content.... or google thinking you have duplicated content.
This is solved by:
a) only displaying certain content on certain pages.  i.e:  {news category='foo'}  will display the summary and detail reports for the articles in the 'foo' category  on the same page... no duplicated content.
OR
b) displaying using the same detail page for everything.   i.e {news category='foo' detailpage='news-details'} on your 'foo' page, and {news category='bar' detailpage='news-details'} on your 'bar' page....   same thing happens, no duplicated content.
AND/OR
c) using the canonical stuff (which has been built in to the news module since the 1.5 days) to tell google (and other smart search engines) the TRUE url for some piece of content, so that there isn't any concept of duplicated content.

The second thing is:
SEARCH ENGINES DONT TRY TO GUESS URLS.
Literally, they start at a page, and they read the page, and find all the links and go to them, then read that page, and continue.   So, with a well thought out, well designed site that is submitted to google only once, or when major things change, there's minimal chance of duplicated content problems.    Now, if you did something silly like submit the URL and the XML file to google whilst you were still developing the site, then 2 months later enabled pretty URLS.... and then without the canonical stuff... yeah, duplicate content problems will creep in for a while.   but it's not a problem of the CMS.

The third thing I have learned is:
99.85 (rough guess) percent of the users DO NOT GUESS URLS.   So therefore it doesn't really matter if it's a really long, really ugly url, they're gonna navigate to it, or bookmark it.... making it pretty and readable makes absolutely no difference to the average visitor.   Case in point... look at tinyurl, bit.ty, etc.... people just share the the urls, they don't try to guess them.     for the 0.15% of the user community that does try to guess URLS.... let them eat 404 errors.

Nuf said.

[katea]

Sorry, I'd have to disagree with you on a couple of points there.

Keywords in URL's are major plus in SEO.....

Hence why people snap up all the major domain names .... If they were not important, then say I had a cake business, and the keywords I was targeting was fairry cakes, california ... I would initially look for http://www.fairycakes.com or http://www.fairycakescalifornia.com right?

I wouldn't look for http://www.websitenamemakesnodifference.com and just throw a blog in it resulting in http://www.websitenamemakesnodifference ... ornia.html ...

Wouldn't it be better for me to have http://www.fairycakes.com/california/1/ ... ornia.html

This way I'd not only have the URL covered, but I indeed have it overwhelmed .... Giving me that little extra edge over the competition.....Have a little search in Google ... See how they like to highlight in bold the exact keywords in URL's that you are searching for ...

If URL's were not important, then why do major keyworded URL's sell for ridiculous money? ... It's like a number plate on your car I guess .... Sure, it doesn't matter if you are a lawyer and you have a standard plate, but wouldn't a number plate saying LAW 1 grab peoples attention? Bad analogy I know, but you get my drift.

I agree, search engines don't try and guess URL's ... However, if your site is optimised (on-site, backlinks, titles, keyword density and so forth) and you have the small added strength of having keywords in a URL, then you'll feature higher, even if it is just slightly ...

I'd say you're spot on with 99.85 percent of people do not guess URL's (unless of course they're looking for a celebrity or something specific... Hence why Google have the I'm Feeling Lucky button).... But if I'm looking for fairy cakes in california, I find a website that has that exact name ... What are the chances I'm going to click on the website with the exact phrase I was searching? Pretty high I would say .... Moreso than if I saw a result like http://www.fubar.com/BlogCategory/1/44/fairy-cakes.php .. For all I know this could be a website that has a guy just saying how much he likes fairy cakes ..... Wheras I k'm pretty sure the people at fairycakes.com specialise in them...

I wasn't just looking to improve the SEO for Google, I was also looking to improve it for searchers .... I want them to click on my site ranked at number 5 before they click on the very top link if I can .... At least until of course I hit the top

To sum up, no, it doesn't need it ... But I never said it needed it, I just said it would be much nicer if it were in place ....

[kendo451]

Domain names are chosen for how easy they are to remember and type.  What follows the domain name is rarely typed.  It is almost always clicked on, or in some cases copied and pasted.

[JeremyBASS]

For what it's worth seems like this is just up for in discussion somewhere else... I have many issues with what katea just said. . .  But this is what they tell us… trust what you read here...

http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/web ... eased.aspx

[calguy1000]

Domain names are chosen for how easy they are to remember and type.  What follows the domain name is rarely typed.  It is almost always clicked on, or in some cases copied and pasted.

Agreed.

and users (99.85% of the time) don't assume that just because www.yoursite.xyz/something/abc/xyz.html works that yoursite..xyz/something/abc will display an index either.... that requires the users to have knowledge more than the average site visitor does.

domain names, yes... I'd agree with them having keywords in them... but modifying the structure of the software just so that you could haphazardly flood the url with keywords seems a) stupid, b) useless, and c) wrong.

[katea]

Domain names are chosen for how easy they are to remember and type.  What follows the domain name is rarely typed.  It is almost always clicked on, or in some cases copied and pasted.

Google highlights keywords in a result in bold ...

http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&source=h ... 4b05e94ce9

Look at all that nice highlighting

The idea is to get the users attention. The more your URL is highlighted, the more likely they are to click on you no?

SEO is for potential customers, not to mentiion reducing bounce rate .... Don't no-one want to go to a result that has little or nothing to do with what they're looking for.

[katea]

For what it's worth seems like this is just up for in discussion somewhere else... I have many issues with what katea just said. . .  But this is what they tell us… trust what you read here...

http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
http://www.bing.com/community/blogs/web ... eased.aspx

I didn't mean to start a huge debate, I merely wanted to suggest an improvemnt or 2.

But I would like to know the many issues

Oh, and the Bing paper is redundant .... Google (70%) works in a totally different way than all other search engines, which is why it's the number one.

[katea]

Domain names are chosen for how easy they are to remember and type.  What follows the domain name is rarely typed.  It is almost always clicked on, or in some cases copied and pasted.

Agreed.

and users (99.85% of the time) don't assume that just because www.yoursite.xyz/something/abc/xyz.html works that yoursite..xyz/something/abc will display an index either.... that requires the users to have knowledge more than the average site visitor does.

domain names, yes... I'd agree with them having keywords in them... but modifying the structure of the software just so that you could haphazardly flood the url with keywords seems a) stupid, b) useless, and c) wrong.

It's not a case of flooding, it's merely a case of applying a little make up to look nicer and be more effective .... Nothing stupid, useless or wrong about that .... When a woman goes out in the evening, she applies her make up ... Why not make up a URL with easy to rememebr URL's that help in your SEO also?

Be totally honest, which looks nicer?

http://www.fairycakescalifornia.com/fai ... ornia.html

or

http://www.fairy-cakes-california.com/B ... ornia.html