Sitemaps with Xmap on Joomla 2.5: (how) can I improve them?

Question

I have a small personal website, bilingual, say namesurname.joomlafree.it, made with Joomla 2.5 (remote installation). I have created with Xmap two sitemaps, one for italian language, one for english.

Then, in one of my pages, I have a video gallery made with HDW Player, with some dozens videos. Each of these, when selected, links to url like:

namesurname.joomlafree.it/en/music-and-videos/video/1.html

...

namesurname.joomlafree.it/en/music-and-videos/video/40.html

These urls are many more than the ones in my sitemaps (say 40 vs. 12) and are not included there.

Should I think of adding those urls to the sitemaps? In that case, how do I do it?

I ask this because, in HDW Player settings, is possible to add description and metadata to each of the videos/urls and I take for granted that it is in some SEO point of view. Thanks!

Answer 1

I use two different site maps:

1. A html site map that users can use to navigate the site.

   This is mainly an overview of the site. It should be nicely formatted and easy to use by humans.

2. A xml site map that search engines can use to find everything I want them to find.

   This contains all the pages that my site has, including the ones in the overview. You can be much more specific in this map since only bots will read it.

If you want those files indexed, I'd add them to your XML site map. You may be able to add them through xmap by adding a menu for them, and menu items for each file (depending on how many files you have that may not be feasible).

What I ended up doing is modifying the xmap plugin, since I wanted to add dynamically changing data to my XML site map. You can do this by editing the display() function in:

components/com_xmap/views/xml/view.html.php

Add the files into the $this->items array after its defined. Each file should contain an array of the following:

id title home priority type link changefreq

It may take some trial and error to get the map displaying the way you want.

Here's how to add the xml site map: http://www.jooxmap.com/documentation/6-howto-xmap-as-sitemap-xml.html

# English sitemap
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/sitemap-en.xml
RewriteRule .* /index.php?option=com_xmap&id=1&view=xml&lang=en

# Spanish sitemap
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/sitemap-es.xml
RewriteRule .* /index.php?option=com_xmap&id=1&view=xml&lang=es

Answer 2

Depending on how your videos are stored in Joomla, you need to enable (or install) Xmap extensions. Each component has a corresponding extension in Xmap. It comes with some core items (content, weblinks etc) but you can install 3rd party ones (K2, Zoo, Flexicontent etc)