Google Sitemap and BlogEngine.NET

May 24, 2007

There seem to be some confusion about the Google Sitemap support of BlogEngine.NET, so I thought I would elaborate on it. First of all, BlogEngine.NET has a build-in sitemap handler so you don’t need to write it yourself.

BlogEngine.NET comes with many build-in handlers such as:

microsumary.axd
sitemap.axd
syndication.axd
commentfeed.axd
opensearch.axd
rsd.axd

…and more not so interesting ones.

All the handlers are accessible by typing http://www.yourblog.com/handler.axd where handler can be any one of them. So, in order to see the generated Google Sitemap just type in http://www.yourblog.com/sitemap.axd in your browser. Here is mine.

Auto discovery

You can tell Google manually about the location of your sitemap file or you can put the URL in the robots.txt file. I recommend putting it in the robots.txt because then Yahoo, MSN, Ask and Google can find it. Yahoo, MSN and Ask also supports the Google Sitemap format.

Just add this line to your robots.txt file:

sitemap: http://www.yourblog.com/sitemap.axd

This line can be the only line in the robots.txt if you don’t want to provide more information to the robots and spiders.

I hope this clears things up.

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New sitemap features in robots.txtDescribes how to enable your sitemap for autodiscovery by all search enginesNew features in the next BlogEngine.NETNews on the upcoming BlogEngine.NET 1.4 including microformats and support for the semantic webNew BlogEngine.NET videosNew videos about BlogEngine.NET are released

Comments (7) -

Ted Jardine

5/25/2007 3:50:01 PM #

FYI, http://www.madskristensen.dk/sitemap.axd cannot be found.

Mads Kristensen

5/25/2007 9:32:33 PM #

I know, because that is not the address of my blog
Try http://blog.madskristensen.dk/sitemap.axd

Lance Bailey

10/18/2007 2:12:08 PM #

thanks you
this and the other tutorials you have done has helped me a great deal

Eric Murray

6/3/2008 9:58:17 PM #

Hi Mads - I love BlogEngine.NET! I just threw a site together. I had a question about sitemap integration with custom static pages - I have added a couple pages outside of the engine's CMS, and was wondering if there's a way to extend something so that I can make sure my custom pages get added to the sitemap.axd file? I can't figure out how to do this. If this can't be done and I create a separate sitemap file manually for my custom pages, will robots honor that one as well, or will they only look at the one? Apologies if this is a basic question, I'm also a little new to ASP.NET.

Thanks!