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apostrophe-site-map

This module generates XML and plaintext sitemaps for sites powered by the Apostrophe CMS.

It serves two purposes: white-hat SEO and content strategy.

SEO with sitemaps

A frequently updated and accurate XML sitemap allows search engines to index your content more quickly and spot new pages immediately. But an out-of-date sitemap is worse than nothing and will damage your site's SEO.

This module generates a sitemap that includes all of the pages on your site that are visible to the public, including "pieces" such as events, and blog posts. And it does so dynamically, with a short cache lifetime, so your sitemap is not out of date.

How to use it

  • Install the module.

npm install --save apostrophe-site-map

  • Configure it in app.js, as one of your modules.
{
  // You should configure `baseUrl` to ensure full URLs in your sitemap
  baseUrl: 'http://example.com',
  modules: {
    {
      'apostrophe-site-map': {
        // array of doc types you do NOT want
        // to include, even though they are
        // accessible on the site. You can also
        // do this at the command line.
        excludeTypes: []
      }
    }
  }
}
  • Just launch your site as you normally would. In development that might just be:
node app
  • Access http://localhost:3000/sitemap.xml (in production, of course, the hostname is different).

AN IMPORTANT WARNING: if you ALREADY have a STATIC public/sitemap.xml file, THAT FILE WILL BE SENT INSTEAD. Remove it. Also, SITEMAPS ARE CACHED for one hour by default, so you won't see changes instantly. Read on for how to change the cache lifetime, and what you can realistically expect from Google.

Clearing the cache, and changing the cache lifetime

To better support multiple-server environments, this module now serves sitemaps directly and caches them in your database. That way we don't have to worry about whether a static file exists in a given environment, running the same task on multiple servers, etc.

By default sitemaps are cached for 1 hour. You can change this by specifying the cacheLifetime option to this module, in seconds. However, don't get too excited: Google usually does not check a sitemap more often than a few times a month.

You can clear the cache at any time with this command line task:

node app apostrophe-site-map:clear

This will force a new sitemap to be generated on the next request.

Generating the sitemap ahead of time

You can use this command line task to update the sitemap in Apostrophe's cache at any time, rather than waiting for it to expire after an hour and generate again on the next request:

node app apostrophe-site-map:map --update-cache

If your site has many pages and pieces, generating the sitemap dynamically may take a long time. Scheduling the above task to run at least twice an hour via a cron job guarantees that a search engine will never be forced to wait when requesting your sitemap. If you have enough content, search engines may hang up before your sitemap is generated, so this task is very useful.

Generating sitemaps as static files

If you wish, you can generate a sitemap as a static file.

Just run this task:

node app apostrophe-site-map:map

When --update-cache is not given, this task generates an XML sitemap and displays it on the console. This is mostly useful for content strategy purposes. If your goal is to serve the sitemap to search engines, see above for a better way.

How to tell Google about your sitemap

Create a public/robots.txt file if you do not already have one and add a Sitemap line. Here is a valid example for a site that doesn't have any other robots.txt rules:

Sitemap: http://EXAMPLE.com/sitemap.xml

You can also have other robots.txt directives if you wish.

On Google's next crawl of your site it should pick up on the presence of the sitemap.

Changing the priority of pages and pieces

By default, an XML sitemap will assign a priority to a page based on its depth. The home page has a priority of 1.0 (the highest), a subpage of the home page 0.9, and so on.

Pieces receive a priority of 0.7; however if they have a startDate property (i.e. they are events) in the future, they bump up to 0.8, and if they have a startDate in the past they bump down to 0.6.

You can also set the priority yourself. Once you install this module you will discover that there is a new "sitemap priority" field in "page settings," and when editing a piece via the edit dialog box. You can set this field to any number between 0.0 and 1.0, with 1.0 being the highest.

As of this writing, Google suggests that they may use the priority to rank the importance of pages relatively within your site. Please do not set all the priorities to 1.0. It will only hurt your chances of communicating which pages are most important to Google.

Content strategy

You can also use this module just to generate a map of your site for your own study:

node app apostrophe-site-map:map --format=text --indent

The result is a very informative depth-first list of pages. Note the use of leading spaces to indicate depth:

/
  /about
    /about/people
    /about/ducklings
/products
  /products/cheesemaker

You'll want to pipe that to a text file and consider printing it.

The displayed "depth" of pieces won't always correspond directly to the pieces-pages that display them. You might want to exclude them when generating content strategy maps.

Warning: watch out for your custom stuff!

This module does the best it can.

It'll list your published pages, and your published pieces. And it'll rank future events higher than past events.

But it doesn't know anything about the custom URLs, independent of Apostrophe's usual mechanisms, that you're generating in your own creative and amazing modules.

If that's a concern for you, create lib/modules/apostrophe-site-map/index.js in your project, subclass the module, and override the custom method to output information about additional URLs. Note: if you have multiple locales via apostrophe-workflow this method is called once per locale. This method now receives req, locale, callback if written to accept three arguments.

It's straightforward: all you have to do is pass Apostrophe page objects, or anything else with an _url property and a siteMapPriority property, to self.output.

Here's a simple example. Note the use of self.host to get the "stem" of the URL (http://mysite.com).

For regular pages in the page tree, level starts at 0 (the home page) and increments from there for nested pages. For your own "pages," just keep that in mind. The higher the level, the lower the priority will be in the XML sitemap. Or pass thesiteMapPriority property explicitly.

This feature is not for changing priorities of existing pages and pieces. It is for your custom routes and dispatch URLs that the module cannot discover on its own. See the "page settings" dialog box or the edit dialog box for a field that lets you set the priority of an ordinary page or piece.

// lib/modules/apostrophe-site-map/index.js, at project level, not in node_modules
module.exports = {
  construct: function(self, options) {
    self.custom = function(req, locale, callback) {
      // Discover something via the database, then...
      self.output({
        _url: 'http://mysite.com/myspecialplace',
        // Defaults to 0.5 if not set and a `level` property
        // cannot be used to infer it
        siteMapPriority: 0.9
      });
      return callback(null);
    };
  }
};

Note that req only has the same privileges as an anonymous site visitor. If you call find methods with it, you will only see what typical site visitors see. This is good, because you don't want Google to index restricted pages.

How to exclude stuff

"I don't want thousands of blog posts in my sitemaps." OK, so do this in app.js when configuring the module:

Or do it in app.js when configuring the module:

  {
    'apostrophe-site-map': {
      excludeTypes: [ 'apostrophe-blog-post' ]
    }
  }

You may specify multiple doc types to exclude.

You can also do this at the command line, which is helpful when generating a map just for content strategy purposes:

node app apostrophe-site-map:map --format=text --indent --exclude-types=apostrophe-blog

Alternatively, you can set the sitemap option to false when configuring any module that extends apostrophe-custom-pages or apostrophe-pieces.

You can also explicitly set it to true if you wish to have sitemaps for a piece type that is normally excluded, like apostrophe-users. Of course this will only help if they have a _url property when fetched, usually via a corresponding module that extends apostrophe-pieces-pages.

Integration with the apostrophe-workflow module

If you are using the apostrophe-workflow module, the sitemap module will automatically fetch content for the live versions of all configured locales.

By default, the result will be emitted as a single sitemap. According to Google, this is OK, although you must claim all of the sites under a single identity in the Google webmaster console. However, if you would prefer a separate sitemap file for each hostname found in the absolute URLs, you can set the perLocale option to true when configuring the module.

Or, if you're generating static sitemaps at the command line, you can pass the --per-locale option.

When you set the perLocale option, sitemaps are served by the module from /sitemaps/fr.xml, /sitemaps/en.xml, etc., and a sitemap index is served from /sitemaps/index.xml. Make sure you list /sitemaps/index.xml for your Sitemap directive in robots.txt.

If you generate static files instead with the apostrophe-site-map:map task, a physical public/sitemap folder is created. IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND AND WISH TO LET THE MODULE SERVE SITEMAPS FOR YOU, REMOVE THIS FOLDER. Otherwise the static files will always "win."

If the perLocale option is set to true for the module or the --per-locale command line parameter is passed, the --file command line parameter is ignored unless --format=text is also present. This allows you to still use the module for content strategy.

Performance

If you have thousands of pieces, building the sitemap may take a long time. By default, this module processes 100 pieces at a time, to avoid using too much memory. You can adjust this by setting the piecesPerBatch option to a larger number. However, be aware that if you have many fields and joins, it is possible to use a great deal of memory this way.

modules: {
  {
    'apostrophe-site-map': {
      piecesPerBatch: 500
    }
  }
}

Changelog

2.3.1: a bug that broke the sitemap generator in the presence of private workflow locales was fixed. Thanks to Albert R. Timashev.

2.3.0: sitemaps for sites localized with the apostrophe-workflow module now include pointers to alternate language versions of each document.

2.2.1:

  • The command line node app apostrophe-site-map:map --update-cache can be used to update the sitemap that will be sent from Apostrophe's internal cache without waiting for the cache to expire. If the task is scheduled to run more often then once an hour, then a search engine will never be asked to wait a long time to generate it. For sites with many pages and pieces this can be critical.

2.2.0:

  • piecesPerBatch option for performance. Still defaults to processing 100 pieces at a time.
  • Support for the hostname option of apostrophe-workflow.

2.1.1: short-lived bug affecting command line tasks.

2.1.0: sitemaps are now served dynamically. They are stored in Apostrophe's cache for a configurable period of time. There is no need to run a command line task, or mess around with static files. Please note that you must remove existing static sitemap files first. See the documentation for important recommendations. Thanks to Michelin for their support of this work.

The documentation has also been overhauled thoroughly to be completely accurate for Apostrophe 2.x.

2.0.4: workflow-aware; new features providing compatibility with the apostrophe-workflow module.

2.0.3: documentation updates.

2.0.1-2.0.2: minor bug fixes.

2.0.0: initial port to Apostrophe 2.x.

2.2.0: enhance performances with many pieces