Site Map Plus questions

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Mainly I guess for @isaiah but happy for anyone to answer!

Reading on the other forum it seems for SMP to work I need to turn off the RW built-in site map. Am I correct on that?

I’ve used SMP on EVERY site I’ve ever built, more or less, but NEVER turned off the RW one… D’oh!

There also seems to be some confusion (on my part anyway) about SMP working with RW8.x. Does it?

And finally, how do I update it? I’ve always assumed it updates itself, but from what I’m reading, this might not be the case?

Thanks.

(How come Your Head doesn’t have a forum/space thingie on here?)

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You do need to turn off the SiteMap functionality in RW as it’ll publish its own sitemap.xml after SMP does its thus overwriting the good one.
The same is true for the SEO stuff RM have added to 8, it’ll wipeout any SEO stuff you’ve done with the likes of Foundation SEO, even of you’ve not set any values it’ll write empty data.

When SMP and the other plugins were with Loghound they didn’t autoupdate, Isaiah has now (I’m 99% sure I’m right on this) incorporated updating so unless your plugin is very old it WILL update within RW.
SMP (and PlusKit) do support RW8, the problems others have had is with older Loghound versions that they didn’t manually update when Isaiah took over the Plugins … even though he posted multiple times on the Forum about it.

You can always go here http://yourhead.com/#products and get the latest version if you’re unsure if your’s is current.

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I’m near sure I bought it from Isaiah, think Loghound was before my time.

But ya, huge D’oh! Regards the not turning off the built in site map. I’ve religiously used SMP since i got it, and use (thought I’d used it) to turn off search on some pages, and all stuff like that. I’m such a fuktard at times.

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@paul.russam is now the official spokesperson of YourHead Software. 😂

exactly as he says. in short: yes and yes.

turn off the RW sitemap. and yes the new version of SiteMap+ (free update at yourhead.com) works great with RW v8.1

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5

The long answer is that some unexpected changes to the RapidWeaver API in v8.1 broke SiteMap+ and quite a list of other things as well. But the broken stuff has nothing to do with that setting in the Advanced section or the RapidWeaver project settings. I’m pretty sure that setting for turning off the RapidWeaver built-in sitemap is as old as SiteMap+. I think that both the RapidWeaver folks and LogHound came out with sitemap solutions at exactly the same time.

Small bugs like this come up from time to time, but normally a quick update makes them pretty pain free. The reason this has suddenly become a larger issue for so many users is that a whole bunch of people aren’t getting automatic updates for from old versions of SiteMap+ and PlusKit and the rest of the older LogHound plugins.

And why are so many people stuck on these older versions of LogHound plugins – after all, I released an update to EVERY ONE of the LogHound plugins almost exactly 2 YEARS ago.

The reason is that I don’t control the LogHound site where the updater files are hosted. John kept control of the LogHound name and website and just transferred ownership of the plugins to me. By the way that was a completely gentleman’s agreement – he just handed me the keys and asked me to take care of things – sometimes businesses can just be nice people and think of their customers first 😃
And I also don’t control the plugin updater – that’s part of the app.

I asked both RMS and John to redirect these update requests, but it was a low priority for everyone – and also apparently too low for me to remember to follow up about it.

The good news is that John has now picked up the dropped baton. Things are moving again and I think we’ll get it taken care of shortly once and for all.

There are still a ton of other broken plugins: Stacks (twice at least), Blocks, and the new version of PlusKit, RapidCart Pro, and every un-updated LogHound plugin.

I think currently only Blocks and RCP are still having some compatibility issues. Everything else has been updated. However it still feels like we haven’t quite found everything the API changes broke just yet.

There is a beta version of Stacks to fix the latest issue on our Slack channel (http://slack.yourhead.com is open to anyone who wants to run our beta stuff – get ready – Stacks 4 beta testing is not far off). Blocks is affected by that same change to the Styled Text API, but the fix there is quite a bit more complex than the Stacks variant – the problem is pretty esoteric, and mostly cosmetic, and Blocks is not very widely used anymore, so I’m taking it slowly and will update Blocks carefully (probably in a week or so).

If anyone has trouble with any of the YourHead (+LogHound) plugins just let me know.

Isaiah

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So now the dilemma: I get really good SE results with pretty much all my sites, I’m bloody good at it ;-)

I’m now worried that changing the way the sitemap is made/presented might upset Google.

Anyone any views on this?

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Scrutiny or the lower priced alternatives like Integrity Pro produce very good sitemaps. They include points such as PDF files, videos and images for a really detailed sitemap and it’s not limited to any particular design app. https://peacockmedia.software/

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@joeworkman has always said that a well maintained SiteMap+ sitemap gives better results.

probably worth doing some real A/B testing. to see what you get. i’d be really curious to know the results of any apples to apples testing anyone does.

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Hard to do real world testing, as it would have to involve a live site, and as such run the risk of messing with good results.

I mean, I could switch a well performing site to SMP (just by turning off the RW default sitemap), but as I say, I’m now worried that doing so might upset Google, and so the results dive, and that woud result in one pissed off client!

I will maybe find a site that isn’t performing too well and make the change and see if results suddenly improve. It’s just a case of finding a bad performing one.

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Comparing the current (RW) sitemap.xml with the one generated by SMP for the same site should easily reveal any differences between the 2.

What I really like SMP for is being able to see and set the indexed/non indexed pages at a glance without having to go to each page. Even if I end up with identical xml files that alone is worth the price.

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Sitemap+ user here as well! You have more granular control with Sitemap.

  • You can easily enable/disable specific pages from the Sitemap.
  • You can see all of your pages in a single view and modify page names, titles, etc. Very powerful.
  • You can also update the change frequency for each page. Although I have to be honest… I don’t know how much this helps SEO.
  • You can also ping Google and Bing to reindex your site directly inside RapidWeaver.

Super useful. I only have two RapidWeaver plugins installed. Stacks and Sitemap Plus.

If you don’t have Sitemap Plus, get it… http://yourhead.com/store

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Maybe on a new site? Publish two (like a .org and a .com) together but with separate sitemaps? But even then it’s tough. If one is more heavily linked to from other ad campaigns or whatnot, then that would likely overshadows any subtle indexing differences.

Hmmm…

This SEO business can be a real challenge to put real data science numbers behind.

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Returning to this, am I right in thinking that when you add a SMP page the internal sitemap thingie is automatically turned off?

I don’t recall ever turning off the internal sitemap, but checking back and all sites with SMP have the internal one unticked.

Is my memory just going?

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You have to turn if of manually

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So memory issues then?

Who are you BTW?

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Chances are if your site(s) has no sub pages then the RW sitemap will produce exactly the same output as SP+, where the RW one falls down is with sub pages as it often doesn’t add them to the xml file.

In SM+ you can set the browser page title, description, if its indexed (visible in the xml file) etc, as SM+ writes all this info to the actual pages in the project then even if RW’s sitemap overwrites the one created by SM+ the info will be correct.

As I said, its only when you have sub pages will the RW one truly fall down.

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Well, today I have learnt a great deal, thanks to Paul, Isaiah, Joe, even the modest Steve ;)

A new sale for Yourhead and some re-organisation for the sites - and I have even remembered to turn off RW default sitemaps!

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After buying / Installing Sitemap + yesterday (thank you all), I have read the manual, but still a couple of questions for experts if I may? @paul.russam @joeworkman @isaiah

Checking the smaller site first: https://wildphotographer.co.uk I am seeing duplicate descriptions and assume search engines will discriminate for repeated data?

I have always diligently used Foundation SEO helper AND filled in RW8 info, so should I now be using Joe’s SEO Helper or Sitemap for all my descriptions, keywords etc? How do they interact? I assume that I will need to empty the SEO fields in RW itself ?

Thanks!

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Bumping this as I think it would benefit others (me).

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I think the answer is to use one of the options available.

Technically speaking you should have one and only one meta description(or any of the meta tags with the same “name”) on a page.
If you add a description with the RW8 built-in, then leave the description blank on sitemap+ and don’t add a description tag with an SEO helper.

If you don’t fill in the description field in SiteMap+ it doesn’t create the description tag. If you leave the description blank on the RW8 Meta tag inspector, it doesn’t create a description tag.

I don’t have the new SEO helper stacks from Joe, but the old Foundation 1 SEO helper allowed you to generate the Description tag or not. I would assume the new one works in a similar fashion.

Since there’s not suppose to be more than one meta tag with the same name, there are no rules for crawlers to follow if there is more than one. So if you have two or more descriptions on a page, what one will Search engines use?

The last test I saw (yes there are folks that have tested this) showed that Google used the first one they found and stopped looking. It’s not like a CSS file that would use the last, and they don’t accumulate them.

There is only supposed to be one meta with the same name on a page so they could easily change tomorrow how they handle multiples on the same page.

This is true for all meta tags including Social tags. So if you want to use outside (like SEO Helper) service to generate FB and Twitter stuff then turn off the ones RW8 generates.

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