Making your SharePoint 2010 public site more searchable | Yaroslav Pentsarskyy on SharePoint Development

If you listened to latest (and not so latest) announcements – there is a big push for SharePoint 2010 implementations in a public site scenario. SharePoint has powerful publishing capabilities and in this release you will probably see more and more public sites coming out build on SharePoint. With that I have to say that SEO capabilities of SharePoint still need some improvement. There are few ways to make your site searchable, I’m talking about any site. One of the methods is exposing a public site map that will allow search engines to crawl your site content based on the hierarchy specified in your site map. Search crawlers will attempt to retrieve “sitemap” file from the root of your site and based on the content there – the crawler will proceed with crawling sub areas and sub sites.

There are few formats for sitemap file; one we will look at here is XML format. XML format is easy to read and construct.

Let’s take a look at a structure of the site map:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&amp</loc>
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
</urlset>

Here,

<sitemapindex> is the root element denoting the sitemap file.
<sitemap> defines a sitemap.
<loc> required node specifying the url of the node (subsite, page).
<lastmod> identifies the time that the corresponding file was modified.

Timestamp information enables search engine crawlers to retrieve information since a certain date.

For more info on the fomat of the file check out here.

So how does it all apply to SharePoint. Well, you will have to create a custom component that will create such file every now and then – based on a schedule and crawl your entire site.

There is avariety of implementations ranging from cstom code to PowerShell scripts that perform crawl. In my next article we’ll take a look at how we can leverage SharePoint Time job framework to do the sitemap population job.