[Alan Hutchison]

I’ve just discovered that Connections doesn’t generate a sitemap for the database entries.

This is a huge omission from the point of view of SEO opportunities IMHO.

I’ve read in the forum that this is on the “To Do” list, but that post was from last year – any updates?

Thanks!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Alan

If your directory home page is in your sitemap, Google will quite happily index the entries within the directory.

[Alan Hutchison]

Thanks for your response Steve – However, I have to wait until whenever the bots decide to spider the site – a sitemap let’s me tell the search engines exactly when I have updated it – so there are significant SEO benefits.

Also another feature request would be to add a “NoIndex” or “Index” option on the various levels that the directory can be accessed – this way I can avoid duplicate content on the site.

If this were added to the Advanced settings tab against each of the permalinks, this would be awesome. We could then tell Google only to index one version of the directory entry, rather than the numerous ways it can be indexed just now.

Do you know if anyone has created a custom robots.txt file to handle the duplicate content issue?

Thanks

[Steven Zahm]

@ Alan

re: another feature request would be to add a “NoIndex” or “Index” option on the various levels that the directory can be accessed – this way I can avoid duplicate content on the site.

Hmmm, I haven’t had this request before and to be honest I am not entirely sure what you are asking. Could you give an example? I’d like to add that to me feature request list and having that would help me remember why I added it to the list in the first place :)

re: Do you know if anyone has created a custom robots.txt file to handle the duplicate content issue?

None that I am aware of. Generally duplicate content is only the result of how the user setup the directory… for example, setting up multiple pages for separate categories but still having the category select enabled on templates which support that feature.

[Alan Hutchison]

Hi Steve,

Sorry I think I misled you – looking into the structure, it looks like I can indeed only access the final record at the /name hierarchy – which is fine. So their shouldn’t be dup content at that level.

However I thinks there can be at other levels. Probably the easiest to explain what I mean is by example. My site is not live yet but should be next week – I’ll come back to you then with some live url examples and hopefully I can explain what I mean a bit better.

Cheers

Alan

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