Google Sitemap for Movable Type

Posted by Miles Evans

Movable Type has no tool for making a Google Sitemap out of the box. Making a Google Sitemap is critical to keeping your website up to date in the SERP’s with big G. Luckily creating a sitemap and even keeping tabs on how often Googlebot visits your website, couldn’t be easier with Movable Type. I use Wordpress on a few blogs and for that I use this Google Sitemap Generator. For this tutorial however, I will describe how to set this up with MT since it is what I am working with here on ProfitPapers.

Create a new template called sitemap.xml or something similar and add the contents of this file to the template. Link the template to a file name like sitemap.xml as well. Click save and rebuild your site. Now every time you rebuild your site a new sitemap.xml file will be built for Google to spider.

Now all you have to do is create an account at Google Sitemaps and submit the URL to the XML file we just generated. Be sure to check it first to make sure it looks ok. You can see how often Googlebot hits your map and if there are any errors. You can also see if your robot.txt file is working to keep the spiders out of areas you specify properly. Presto – that’s it.

Keep in mind that the site map I gave you (the one I use for this website) is based on an Indivual and Category based archive. The template I created outputs the main index page, all individual archives and also category archive links in the sitemap. If you want a date based archive spidered you will need to add some tags for that as well. For some more banter on creating a good Google sitemaps template for Movable Type check out Cameron’s page.

Update: Yahoo have launched a similar sitemaps and of course they use a completely different format than Google. Check out my article on automating a Yahoo sitemap generator for any website.

Posted Feb 21, 2006 at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!