HTML Sitemaps

I've always understood it was good SEO practice to put a HTML sitemap on one's site somewhere. CS-Cart's options for this are extremely poorly executed. Best I can tell you have to manually add all links, under certain named categories.



Ever since I first started using CS-Cart back in 2009 I have had a static HTML sitemap on my site, linked to from every page in the site (from the footer). This enables users and search engine bots to find every page on the site.



HOWEVER, the drawback to this is that you have to keep manually updating it whenever you add or delete products. Otherwise, you get “Crawl Errors” in Google's Webmaster Tools.



Does anyone know of an automated way to get an up-to-date HTML sitemap on a CS-Cart web site?



I like the Google Sitemaps Addon and it seems to do a very good job. But there is no equivalent for HTML sitemaps.



Any help appreciated as always.

Kingsley,



Have you tried Admin Panel>Design>Sitemap (also see Sitemap Settings)



Then we just added a Sitemap link to top & bottom template blocks

Hmmm… I've been trying to figure that out for the last half hour or so, but I'm not getting anywhere. Can you give me more specific details and also a link to see the sitemap on your site that it produces. Thanks.

I wonder if I somehow disabled the built-in sitemap capability when I first set up the cart. Because I sure am not seeing any results from anything I'm doing now. And I can't seem to find any instructions in the Knowledgebase. Maybe I just need to submit a ticket to helpdesk.

Does this work for ya? :unsure:



Sitemap



You should not need to be re-creating a manual sitemap every time you add new products or categories!



I am not for certain if it automatically regenerates after a product or category is changed, however, even if it does not it certainly does regenerate if you clear your site cache.

Wow! Thanks!



That's still not a full sitemap of every page on the site, but it will do for now.



Is there a way to get a search engine friendly URL? like …com/sitemap.html?

[quote]That's still not a full sitemap of every page on the site, but it will do for now.[/quote]



Try the “Add Sitemap Section” when at the sitemap settings page, I believe this is where you would add other static page links as needed.



As far as a more seo friendly url, I am not certain off the top of my head as to whether you can easily change this, perhaps within the SEO addon? I just added that url within our “Sitemap” Link

Hi,

Contenu > SEO rules



If you want to specify a SEO-name for the URL http://example.com/index.php?dispatch=categories.catalog, you need to enter the “categories.catalog” value into the “The value of the “dispatch” parameter from the URL” field and specify the SEO name in the “SEO name” field.





Dispatch value = sitemap.view > SEO = sitemap



lucien