Sitemaps are xml files that tell search engines which sites you would like to be available in a web search. The scope of this discussion encompasses Google web searches only.

The site map file contains metadata about the available sites on your server. For information on the sitemap protocol, please refer to the Google page on using the sitemap protocol. The sitemap file must be available via the web on your server.

Metacat generates the sitemap file automatically on a daily basis (more on this in the next section). You will need to manually register the sitemap file with Google in order for it to take effect. We discuss that in the Submit Your Sitemap section.

Metacat automatically generates sitemap files for all public documents in your catalog. You can view the sitemap files at:

You should verify that your sitemap files are available to the web by browsing to

You will need to register for a Google Webmaster Tools account in order to register your sitemaps. A good description of how to do this is on the Google help site. Follow the instructions there to get your sitemaps registered.

One note: you should register the full url path to your sitemap files, including the http:// (or https://) headers.

You will need to periodically revisit the Google Webmaster Tools utility to refresh your sitemap registration as you add more publicly accessible data to Metacat.

A future enhancement to Metacat will automatically refresh the sitemap registration when necessary, although you will still need to do the initial registration manually.