A knowledge base sitemap is an list of pages (articles/categories/news) organized in hierarchical order, accessible to web crawlers or users. Sitemaps play a vital role in search engine optimization and they especially help with large, complex knowledge bases that search engines such as Google and Bing may have trouble to index fully. When search engines quickly crawl through your knowledge base pages it results in better search engine rankings. With better search engine rankings, your customers can quickly find answers to queries that they have.
How to create sitemap in PHPKB?
If you have a 'Superuser' role, you can generate the sitemap from "Sitemap Generator" link available under "Tools" section of your knowledge base. You can refer to Sitemap Generator article for detailed information on sitemap generation.
Sitemap Formats
PHPKB knowledge management software allows you to create the sitemap in three formats i.e. XML, text and HTML.
XML sitemap is created for search engines to inform them about the URLs that are available on the website. It will help search engines to find all pages that can be nested a few directories deep.
Text sitemap is provided in sitemap generator as it might be useful to have a plain list of all your website links for reference in one place, a single text file. The sitemap contains one website URL per line.
HTML sitemap is simply a hierarchical list of links to web pages of your website. It helps users to review in a quick glance index of pages of the site, which promotes site usability.
When do you need a sitemap?
A sitemap can improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites, or more specialized files. You can benefit from using a sitemap if you have:
- a large knowledge base
- a knowledge base with pages not linked to each other. You can use article linking feature to link the articles.
- a newly created knowledge base
- a knowledge base that uses rich media content
How to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console?
- Sign in to your Google Search Console.
- In the sidebar, select your website.
- Then click on "Sitemaps" available under the "Index" section.
- Add the sitemap URL generated through PHPKB knowledge base software in the "Add a new sitemap" field.
- Click Submit
