Dynamic Site Map
Today I suddenly realised the client had asked for a Site Map when of course osCommerce doesn’t come with one. A quick search on the osCommerce site and I came across Dynamic Sitemap. This is perfect for the job. I added it on within about 10 minutes and then ran through the configuration of the page. You get a page under the Tools section of the admin to allow you to choose who sees the pages within the sitemap, whether they’re not shown at all (such as the Checkout Success page) or whether they’re just shown to account holders (eg. the Lost Password page). The sitemap is printed out in two lists, one of the various pages available, all of your static pages plus the various cart pages, along with a list of all of the product categories. The anchor text for each page is pulled from the Header title defined under the languages/your-language directory eg. languages/english. All files within the directory are read and offered for the Site Map, and as they’re read every time, any new pages will automatically be picked up.
This is a pretty good way to get your site well indexed within the search engines. It gives them a page which isn’t using a dynamic URL (ie. a URL with a question mark and extra variables in) which they have more trust in. Then the search engine spiders will follow these links and get deeper into your site, indexing the category pages thus giving you more scope within the search engines.
Very easy to set up and a great feature to have.
Search engines hitting a large OSC store can be a disaster. Often hosting companies will limit users to
November 14th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
Well the sitemap only links to the static pages and the category pages, not individual product pages, which yes wouldn’t necessarily be a good idea from the bandwidth point of view. However you could control this with the robots.txt file, either block certain spiders or at least slow their hit rate down.
November 14th, 2006 at 11:28 pm