many products, big site map, what now?

[completerookie]

simple question,

the site has 5000+ products, is there any reason why you can't have a master sitemap leading to sub-sitemap-a and also sub-sitemap-b etc
will the search engines penalise you (after all, they say the sitemaps are for search engines )

[pinbrook]

A sitemap should be for human visitors, I often use them - especially on sites with rubbish navigation

Google sitemap etc are for spiders

[wjcampbe]

Kevin - is that 5000 pages at a page per product or 500 pages at 10 products per page, or 100 pages at 50 products per page?

The SE webmaster guidelines state that the bigger players have a preference for 100 max links on each sitemap page.

I guess if it's 5000 pages, the only solution is to let Actinic generate the one huge page, upload it, view and copy source, rewrite (using cut and paste) into 50 usable sitemap pages, hand link all those together, add the 49 new page names to Additional files....surely not????

[completerookie]

slightly theoretical question (but aiming for the future)
The other-half wants her products at one per page for the most part, so the page count is starting to climb already.

we read of people with 1 product per page, and so you would end up with 5000 pages, thats a lot in one bite.
sure, if its 10 producs on one age, thats only 500 pages, still a lot for one sitemap page

the sitemap is auto-generated so what would happen, I guess one heck of a large sitemap

User navigation can be solved by including "parent section trails" (breadcrumbs) and then on to the current section contents, so the amount of links again becomes navigable.

I understand that the sitemap will serve the customers AND the spiders, but once you start to get a large site . . . you MUST start thinking of ALL formats of navigation.

I already use un-ordered lists with the sitemap so indenting is relatively easy, its what happens when the sitemap page becomes massive.

[los_design]

Hi Kevin

One of our current projects involves a client with a target product range of 40,000. We are with John on this one.

Once the site is completed, we will be creating a 'master map' if you like by hand and removing the site map content from within Actinic.

Maybe 1 or 2 more links that 50 but still well within the accepted boundaries AND as you both allure to, aimed at the human users first and it will reap the benefits of SE bots to boot.

Regards

[completerookie]

40k hmmmm (he said dreaming . . . .)
thats what I thought, if the project gets that big, then I need to put more effort into the site map

[fergusw]

Hi Kevin,
Why not use V8's conditions to restrict the sitemap to top level sections only?

You can do this by adding a condition to the
"Site Map Section Link" layout Code

Change it to

<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22IsSectionIncludedInSiteMap%22%20%2f%3e" >
   <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionLevelIsGreaterThan1%22%20%2f%3e"> &nbsp;</actinic:block>
   <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionLevelIsGreaterThan2%22%20%2f%3e"> &nbsp;</actinic:block>
   <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionLevelIsGreaterThan3%22%20%2f%3e">&nbsp;</actinic:block>
   <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionLevelIsGreaterThan4%22%20%2f%3e">&nbsp;</actinic:block>
   <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionLevelIsGreaterThan5%22%20%2f%3e">&nbsp;</actinic:block>
   <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionLevelIsGreaterThan6%22%20%2f%3e">&nbsp;</actinic:block>
   <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionLevelIsGreaterThan7%22%20%2f%3e">&nbsp;</actinic:block>
   <actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionLevel%22%20%2f%3e%20%3c%202" >
	   <a href='<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22IsLoginPageSuppressed%22%20%2f%3e%20AND%0d%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22UnregCustomersAreNotAllowed%22%20%2f%3e" ><actinic:variable name="SectionPageName" /></actinic:block><actinic:block if="%28%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22IsLoginPageSuppressed%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20false%29%20OR%0d%28%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22UnregCustomersAreNotAllowed%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20false%29" ><actinic:variable name="SectionURL" /></actinic:block>'>
      -&nbsp;<Actinic:Variable Name="SectionName">
   </a>
   </actinic:block>
  
<br />
</actinic:block>

and it should work.

Explanation:
You simply create a BLOCKIF which simply restricts the section showing if the SECTIONLEVEL is less than 2 i.e. is only home page or top level sections.

Condition looks like

<actinic:variable name="SectionLevel" /> < 2

If you wanted the top 2 levels then you would simply change this to

<actinic:variable name="SectionLevel" /> < 3

Hope this helps

[completerookie]

I'm quite happy using section level conditions, but that will restrict the number of levels being shown on the sitemap, thus defating the object.

Its not a matter of showing all the products, its how to do it efficiently, afterall, whats the point of a sitemap if it only shows the top two levels.

don't get me wrong, I'm rapidly making new layouts, conditions, variables etc etc so creating the actual code won't be a problem

[DaveSMR]

I appreciate this is an old thread and so may not get a reply, but what did you end up doing to resolve this?

[fergusw]

6 years ago! Sheesh!

Dave,
Perhaps it may be better if you detail what you are explicitly wanting to achieve and then seeing if we can come up with a better, newer alternative. Are you still on V8/9 or have you upgraded?
If you're on V10 or V11 perhaps you could create a new thread in the relevant forum and get answers specifically for that version.

Things have moved on quite a bit in the 6 years and the original request can be undertaken in several different ways e.g. CSS styling, AJAX queries, PHP within Actinic etc.......

[DaveSMR]

STILL stuck in v9 for the largest site, contrary to my best intentions.

At any given time we roughly have about 5000 pages, that change frequently. Having such a dramatically large sitemap does exceed what the big G want to see in the way of file size and number of links to the page.

I have been harassed about this for a while now (from above) and was just turning my focus to the forums before I began attempting to solve the problem.

As it stands I think I already have a viable solution which I am applying some finishing touches to now. It will create my HTML "sitemaps" each to size and also an xml sitemap with a working priority structure, per upload. Happy days!!

[fergusw]

Sounds like you're on it anyway Dave.
For this type of thing we would generally recommend utilising the inbuilt PHP engine in Actinic to create an XML file specifically for the Google Sitemap feed, then attaching this file as an Additional File will ensure Actinic maintains the contents of the XML and uploads it to the acatalog folder.
It then becomes a simple measure to point Google to the specific XML file.
You can then alter the Actinic sitemap as you see fit for your customers use.

[DaveSMR]

I did something similar but since the XML was a subsequent consideration I had my HTML pages created server side. Creating the correct number of pages with a manageable number of links per page. Since I already had this in place, I just extended the existing functionality to create the XML at the same time. It's very lightweight which is always nice.

[NormanRouxel]

For anyone wanting to just limit the depth of the Site Map, it's a one liner. Edit layout Site Map Section Link. And change the first line from:

<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22IsSectionIncludedInSiteMap%22%20%2f%3e" >

To:

<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22IsSectionIncludedInSiteMap%22%20%2f%3e%20%26%26%20%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SectionLevel%22%20%2f%3e%20%3c%3d%202" >

The 2 is the max-depth required.