In some cases, you may wish to make sure that the contents of your VuFind system are visible beyond your local site. This page provides tips and tools for increasing and controlling search engine visibility.

This feature was added after the release of VuFind 1.0.1.

Several search engines look for sitemap files which list all of the pages of your site and ensure that no content is missed during indexing. For example, sitemaps are useful in combination with Google Webmaster Tools.

VuFind comes with a simple tool for generating sitemaps. To use it, follow these steps:

1. Edit the sitemap.ini file under your VuFind installation to specify the location of the generated sitemaps and some other settings. All options are explained by comments within the file.

2. Switch to the util folder under your VuFind installation, and run:

php sitemap.php

This may take some time. When it is complete, your sitemap file(s) will be generated.

You may wish to automate this so that sitemaps are built on a regular basis; see the Automation page for tips on automating VuFind-related tasks.

If you have important static content pages (landing pages, texts about services/institutions, etc.), you may wish to include these in a base sitemap as a complement to the record list build by VuFind's sitemap generator. If your VuFind instance serves content in multiple languages, you may also wish to take advantage of the ?lng= GET parameter to provide multiple language-specific versions of the link in the sitemap. See RelBib's baseSitemap.xml for an example.

Early versions of VuFind made use of the standard Solr TermsComponent for extracting identifiers. This is still available as a configurable option, since it is very fast, but it does not account for certain configuration options such as hidden filters and may not properly represent your site. Starting with VuFind 5.1, the default behavior was changed from TermsComponent to a slower but more universally compatible search-based approach. The configuration can be changed via the retrievalMode setting in sitemap.ini.

Search engine optimization is challenging to maintain, because search engines are constantly changing their rules for crawling and ranking. Google, for example, can update its procedures hundreds of times every year (see History of Google Algorithm Updates for details). News sites like Search Engine Land can provide some help in learning about recent changes and trends.

robots.txt - Recommendations for restricting search engine access to avoid confusing results and/or unnecessary server load.