Sitemaps in SharePoint 2013

Posted in SharePoint 2013, SiteMaps by

In sharepoint 2013, we have native support for generating xml sitemaps which was not present in the earlier versions of sharepoint. Sitemaps basically inform the search engines about the pages and their metadata, present in your site. This help the crawlers in picking up those pages. This is a great feature especially for public facing websites.

The steps to generate sitemap are straightforward but nowhere I found complete documentation on it. So to begin with, there are three prerequisites for generating sitemap:

  1. This feature is available for publishing sites only.
  2. Anonymous access should be enabled for both web application and site collection.
  3. Search should be configured in the environment.

The step by step procedure to generate sitemap is:

  1. Enable anonymous access for web application.
    For this go to “Central Admin” -> “Manage Web Applications” . Select your web application and click on “Authentication Providers” in top ribbon.
    Click on the zone. There you will get the option to enable anonymous access.
    AnonymousAccessWebApp
  2. Enable anonymous access for site collection.
    Go to “Site Settings” -> “Site permissions”. Click on “Anonymous Access” in the top ribbon and select “Entire Web site”. Click “OK”
    Anonymous Access Site Collection
  3. Activate “Search Engine Sitemap” feature of site collection. This registers a timer job “Search Engine Sitemap Job” for generating sitemap. This job by default runs daily.
    Site collection feature
  4. As sitemap generation uses Search Service to generate sitemap; run full crawl or incremental crawl as applicable to your environment.
    Go to “Central Admin” -> “Application Management” -> “Manage service applications” -> “Search Service”.
    Then click on “Content Sources” and run full/incremental crawl for your content source.
  5. For getting instantaneous result, run the timer job mentioned in step 4 for your web application manually.
  6. And we are done.

The sitemap is located at the root level site collection. The url to access the sitemap is http://<WebApp>/sites/<SiteColl>/sitemap.xml. This file contains the location of actual sitemap and that is http://<WebApp>/sites/<SiteColl>/sitemap0.xml. The content of the sitemap file is like:
Sitemap

Hope this helps.

11 thoughts on “Sitemaps in SharePoint 2013”

    • Go to this page and in “Edit Properties” (inside “Page” tab) you will find “Edit SEO Properties”. There you will get an option to remove it from Sitemap.

      Remove From SEO

      Reply

      • Correct me if I’m wrong. I have pages linked under terms computers and phones for example : /computers/pc and /computer/mac , /phones and /phones/apple and /phones/apple/iphone6s. Now I want to exclude only /computers/pc and everything below /phones. Wouldn’t this setting on /computers.aspx page exclude the remaining terms under it?

  4. is it normal to have multiple site map? in my sitemap.xml, i have 365 sitemaps! then i can check the value of sitemap_0.xml, sitemap_200.xml etc etc… SEO report don’t like this… and there’s not a lot of documentation on the web….

    Reply

  5. I’m new to the SP admin center and am trying to locate the “Central Admin” -> “Manage Web Applications” section. We’re 100% SharePoint 365 but I don’t know if that makes a difference. Has the location and/or naming of this changed in recent MSFT updates?

    Reply

    • Hello Brian, this post is about SP 2013 on-prem environment and not O365. I am not sure if we can manage sitemaps in O365. Central Admin is available for on-premise and O365 has Admin Center. Hope this helps.

      Reply

      • Thanks. I was able to enable the “Search Engine Sitemap” feature of site collection, which is my main site collection. It appears to have Anonymous Access enabled as well. However, when I try to get the sitemap itself all I get is the following:

        https://:443/sitemap0.xml

        https://:443/sitemap_mobile0.xml

        There are several sub-sites, pages, etc. on the main site collection so I’m not sure why it’s not generating.

  6. Pingback: Care este locația pentru Sharepoint Sitemap implicit?

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