5 Minute Joomla Tutorial - How to Create Dynamic Sitemap for Joomla with XMAP

STEPS

1. Download and install the appropriate version of XMAP for your Joomla site. Xmap currently supports all versions of Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, and 2.5

2. Once installed successfully, you'll want to go to your plugin manager and enable any Xmap related plugin that applies to your site. (Xmap for Joomla 2.5 comes with some auxiliary plugins to generate sitemaps for Kunena, Sobipro, Mosets Tree, and Virtuemart. At the least, enable the Xmap Content Plugin and the Xmap Weblinks Plugin.)

3. Then navigate to your extensions and components menu and go to Xmap. Once there, create a new sitemap. Give it a name, enable it, set it to public. Under the Menus settings in the same screen, check the box(s) to tell Xmap which menu links you want indexed in the sitemap. Hit save and close.

4. Then you will see a link to the XML sitemap. Click it to see if the sitemap was successfully created. If it was, you can copy the url in your browser's address bar and use this as a basis for submitting to Google using your webmaster tools account attached to your website.


Sitemap: {the complete url of your xmap xml sitemap}

Example:

[ahoraLentiendo]

Great video. I've spent the whole morning learning how to do it and I was confused. Then I saw your tutorial and in 5 min it was done. Thank you very much!

[shoutoutmediaads]

No problem. thanks for the nice comment :) I didn't realize about the robots.txt file either. I used pearanalytics and it keep telling me i didn't have a sitemap. After putting the location into the robots.txt file, it corrected the problem. Google, of course, should find the file since you submit it directly, but it never hurts to add it. One caution, many hosts offer seo services from Atracta where they'll create a sitemap. Be careful, I had them overwrite all my robots.txt files! FYI :)

[shoutoutmediaads]

Hey Samson, xmap mainly creates links for items that are actual MENU items of one kind or another. Since it's a popular extension some extension developers will provide an XMAP plugin for their extension. Check your classified's extension for an xmap compatibility plugin. If they have one, then it should create links that xmap can see and add to it's list of indexed links.

[shoutoutmediaads]

part 2 - you should notice the sitemap page updates after reloading the page to reflect the links for this language. so even though the sitemap xmap component generates one url for the primary language in the admin side for you to see. it actually creates one for each of the language groups. You can manually change the url in the browser just to make sure. Knowing this, you can then submit each version to search engines such as "en/index", then "vi/index" and so on and so forth.

[shoutoutmediaads]

part 2 part 2 - you should notice the sitemap page updates after reloading the page to reflect the links for this language. so even though the sitemap xmap component generates one url for the primary language in the admin side for you to see. it actually creates one for each of the language groups. You can manually change the url in the browser just to make sure. Knowing this, you can then submit each version to search engines such as "en/index", then "vi/index" and so on and so forth.

[AndreaAcostaPazmino]

Thanks!!!! I was lost!! you helped me a lot!

[shoutoutmediaads]

Hey yazo1300, sorry for not noticing this question earlier, but i have a possible answer. Here's how running Joomla 2.5 and using the core multilanguage feature. (Not sure about the Joomfish, but you can try) Create a sitemap in xmap and include all the menus involved in both languages. Visit the url. You'll notice a language code in the string ". Manually change the "en" to the other language of your site like "vi" for vietnamese.

[MultiChannelZero]

thanks, very helpful, I just needed to check I was doing it right so this was good. thanks for the robots.txt info too, didn't know about that ;) Have a Great Day ;)

[MarioBraeken]

Great video - can I ask what template you're using in your J! back-end ?

[MightyFrostDragon]

Hi, thanks for the post, it wa really helpful. i still have a question, google tutorial tells us that it's best to not have any id on the url you submit on the robot.txt. How can we operate then?

[oasisinformative]

Nice Video. Its very helpful for me. Thank you so much.

[shoutoutmediaads]

Hey Joop, I'd say first get your multilanguage function working properly. That would be most important. then try to do the sitemap. Doing multilingual site maps for core content using xmap - Create a sitemap in xmap and include all the menus involved in both languages. Visit the url. You'll notice a language code in the string ". Manually change the "en" to the other language of your site like "vi" for vietnamese. see next comment for rest of post.

[JoopGeesinkTribute]

Great video! Thankx. Please could you inform me how to create a site map in two different languages? I build my site in Dutch and added JDict to write a translation. Pressing on the UK-flag results in an error:
"5 - cannot calculate position of ('en-GB', '*') within ('en-GB', '*')LIMIT 1"
How to solve this? Now I use the sitemap for Dutch only. Google-index will not be happy I think.

[shoutoutmediaads]

Hi, you know i'm not sure about this one. do you have any reference material i can read more about this ? :)

[oferlanger]

Thank you for the great explaination. For some reason I get a "page not found" when clicking on XML Sitemap on the Sitemaps Manager (on XMAP). I wonder why...?

[yazo]

Hi!, I have a multilingual joomla site, and the xml map only shows the default language, I had already review the xmap forum, but it says something about the adding the language prefix like /es to the url, and nobody seems to know how, do you have any idea that I might use? Thanks in advanced. (can I do the xml myself?)

[osoanasteciado]

pearlanalitycs seem offline..simil site? exellent tutorial! thanks!

[Samfdz]

mine is a Classified site before installing Xmap I generated sitemap from xml-sitemaps (the website I searched on Google) and it gave me 500+ links but with Xmap gives me just 5 links any guess what should I do...

[skatejam]

do you speak japanese? you said kunena pretty smoothly haha