What is a Site Map?

A sitemap (which may also be called a Document Tree) is an XML file, or a file that is both human readable and machine readable. The sitemap lists the urls of the KB pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your KB site's content. Search engine web crawlers read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.

Your KB sitemap can provide supplemental and valuable metadata associated with the KB page urls listed in your sitemap. Metadata is information about your KB pages, such as when the page was last updated. You can use a sitemap to provide Google with metadata about specific types of content on your pages; including video, image, and mobile content.

How to Get To Your Institution's Main KB Sitemap

• Go to your institution's main External KB URL
• Append url with /sitemap_xml.php

What will appear is a dynamic sitemap/document tree. For institutions with multiple group spaces, the sitemap exists only in the root domain, which prevents duplicative entries for content that is shared with multiple spaces or is indexed in the Unified KB. Another advantage to using your KB sitemap is that it is dynamic, so inactive documents will not be indexed, and new documents will be added automatically.

• Note: This feature is not available for your internal KB sites, as we don’t want your internal content being indexed. You will receive a Page Not Found error if you attempt to access the sitemap file under an internal URL.

If you navigate to the "sitemap_xml.php" file under your KB's main external directory (in the example below, we went to "kb.wisc.edu/sitemap_xml.php"), you will be presented with an XML file listing all of your institution's currently active external documents. For each document, the URL and last updated date will be shown.

• Note: For institutions that have a Unified KB and multiple group spaces, the URLs listed will point to the owning group's subsite directory.