SEO: Intelligent SiteMaps in Dolphin 7.1 Osho

As we mentioned before our goal is to turn Dolphin into a search-engines-best-friend. Due to presence of so many different features Dolphin has lots of "service" pages mostly used for browsing and featuring content pages. So, search engines may have trouble understanding that browsing pages are not very important, while it is content pages that should be crawled and given most attention. The issue is especially apparent when the site is new and search engines only index a limited number of pages from it. 

Luckily, companies that run those search engines understand this problem and provide a solution - SiteMaps. When the SiteMaps standard is properly utilised, content pages may be pushed up to be presented as more important for appearing in search results. 

There are many different automated tools and mods that help to generate a site-map, but they will never substitute an integrated site-wide system, designed according to the standard. Today, we're presenting just that - intelligent SiteMaps natively integrated into Dolphin.

What It Does

When activated, SiteMap "tells" search engine robot-clowlers which pages of the site represent actual content, which are most important, and which are just "service" pages that are either less important or shouldn't be considered at all. 

So, in our implementation, the SiteMaps are tuned to give priority to pages like Blog Post, Article Page, Photo Page, Event Page, etc. Browsing pages, like calendar, featured items, module homepage, etc. are given less priority or are left for standard crawling "pace". Some of those pages may even be empty, like for example when user didn't post any blog posts, but still has "Blogs" tab in their profile. Now they wouldn't confuse search engines and litter your site's index.

Another important feature is that SiteMaps tell search engines how often it needs to re-crawl pages. For example, when Blog Post is submitted it will suggest that it needs to be re-crawled every hour during the first few days, then every day in the first few weeks, then every week, and later - every month. Thanks to these instructions search engines are able to pick up comments early, and at later stage minimise load on pages that don't need to be re-checked often.

Benefits 

The most important benefit is that pages with unique content are given more weight than all other pages. Their positions on search engines would benefit from this, because site's "reputation rank" is distributed in a way favouring unique content.

Another great perk is frequent crawling of fresh content, which greatly improves short-term positions for new items and allows updates, such as comments, push up the original content back into spotlight.

And finally, managing crawling frequency and instructing about pages importance will greatly reduce server load that some crawlers tend to bring when accessing browsing (read server-stressing) pages too often. See, they can be rather stupid about it thinking that it is important to index page-2, page-3, page-4.... of your "Browse Photos" page a few times a day, just because they seem to be updating often. In reality, it has already indexed all the content when it was on page-1 and now it can even get an impression of duplicate content published on your site. Telling the robot what to do is very important in this scenario, and we've already witnessed rather serious load spikes caused by overly enthusiastic crawlers. Not anymore.

So, say "Hello!" to the new SiteMaps. They can be generated via a new Tool in Dolphin Admin...

Developers of third-party modules will need to make sure their products support it as well. We've pre-tuned default settings for importance and crawling intervals, so it should work seamlessly with your Osho-powered sites very soon.