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KB User's Guide - General Info - View Your Institution Sitemap

Search engine web crawlers read your Institution's site map (and consequently its content) to intelligently crawl your site. It provides valuable metadata associated with the KB documents listed in that sitemap. Metadata is information about a KB document, such as when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and the importance of the page relative to other documents in your site. This document will show you how to access your Institution's Main KB Site Map.

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.

The Page Not Found error given when trying to find the sitemap on an internal site.

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.

The KB sitemap_xml.php page.



Keywordssitemap site map xml urlset url set loc lastmod changefreq priority element trees root element child elements sub elements sibling branches hierarchical structure google site content site organization document tree human machine readable web crawler metadata   Doc ID55719
OwnerLeah S.GroupKB User's Guide
Created2015-08-27 17:03:21Updated2023-06-30 13:51:15
SitesKB User's Guide
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