Sitemaps allow you to inform search engines about your web site's URLs that are available for crawling.
Google developed its own Sitemap Protocol, which can be very easily generated from Movable Type using Cameron Bulock's template. This template adds the main index page, all individual archives as well as monthly and category archive links to a sitemap.
For other search engines, I found out a SEO firm developed ROR, a search engine independent format, which can be used to generate sitemaps, but also product catalogues, etc. The format is described here. Several thousands web sites use it.
As I was not happy with the results of ROR's free sitemap generator, I thought I would adapt Cameron's Movable Type template to ROR format.
Help yourself:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- This file is a ROR Sitemap for describing this website to the search engines. For details about the ROR format, go to www.rorweb.com. -->
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:ror="http://rorweb.com/0.1/" >
<channel>
<title>ROR Sitemap for <$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></link>
<item>
<title>ROR Sitemap for <$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link><$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></link>
<ror:about>sitemap</ror:about>
<ror:type>SiteMap</ror:type>
</item>
<item>
<link><$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></link>
<ror:updatePeriod>day</ror:updatePeriod>
<ror:sortOrder>0</ror:sortOrder>
<ror:resourceOf>sitemap</ror:resourceOf>
</item>
<MTArchiveList archive_type="Individual">
<item>
<link><$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$></link>
<ror:type>Article</ror:type>
<ror:updated><$MTArchiveDate format="%Y-%m-%d"$></ror:updated>
<ror:sortOrder>1</ror:sortOrder>
<ror:resourceOf>sitemap</ror:resourceOf>
</item>
</MTArchiveList><MTArchiveList archive_type="Category">
<item>
<link><$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$></link>
<ror:updatePeriod>week</ror:updatePeriod>
<ror:sortOrder>2</ror:sortOrder>
<ror:resourceOf>sitemap</ror:resourceOf>
</item>
</MTArchiveList><MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">
<item>
<link><$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$></link>
<ror:updatePeriod>week</ror:updatePeriod>
<ror:sortOrder>3</ror:sortOrder>
<ror:resourceOf>sitemap</ror:resourceOf>
</item>
</MTArchiveList></channel>
</rss>
To set this up on your Movable Type blog, simply copy the code into a new index template, set it to output as ror.xml, and add the following line in the <head> of your main page:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="ROR" href="<$MTBlogURL$>ror.xml" />
Update 2006/10/26: Yahoo! Search introduced Site Explorer, which "allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page." The tool is pretty similar to Google's Webmaster tools. More information is available in online help pages.
Once you have registered your web site with Yahoo! Search, you will be able to submit a site feed (or sitemap). Yahoo! supports RSS and Atom feeds, as well as "a text file containing a list of URLs, each URL at the start of a new line. The filename of the URL list file must be urllist.txt."
Generating that text file with a Movable Type template is straightforward:
<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$> <MTArchiveList archive_type="Individual"> <$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$> </MTArchiveList><MTArchiveList archive_type="Category"> <$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$> </MTArchiveList><MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly"> <$MTArchiveLink encode_xml="1"$> </MTArchiveList>
To set this up on your Movable Type blog, simply copy the code into a new index template, set it to output as urllist.txt, and submit it to Yahoo! Search Site Explorer.
