Creating a sitemap for the Help Center

Creating a sitemap for the Help Center

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers like Googlebot. They allow search engines to find all of your webpages, that they might otherwise miss when indexing. For a more detailed account of the site map, read this article on Wikipedia. By creating a site map for your Help Center, you enable search engines to learn the organization of your knowledge base content and correctly index your articles. Although site maps come in two flavors: HTML and XML, we will deal with the XML format in Zoho Desk.

Important:
  1. Creating a site map is optional since search engines will still index all your Help Center articles.

Creating a site map
Creating an XML site map for your Help Center is a simple process that you can do it in a click without wasting much time or effort in it.
To create a site map:
  1. Click the Setup icon (  ) in the top bar.
  2. Click Help Center under the Channels menu.
  3. Select the Help Center for which you want to create a sitemap.
  4. On the Rebrand page, click SEO from the left panel.



  5. On the SEO page and under XML Sitemap, click Generate Sitemap.
    An XML site map link is instantly created. You can click on the link to view the site map content on a new tab.


The site map XML file will now be used by Google and other search engines to crawl knowledge base.

Notes:
  1. The site map will be automatically updated every 5 days.
  2. XML site maps can be created only for domain-mapped Help Centers.
  3. If you're a new Zoho Desk customer who signed up after June 13, 2019, you automatically get the XML site map created.
  4. You can submit your XML sitemap to each search engine using their own webmaster tools solutions. If you don’t want to do that, adding a sitemap line to your robots.txt is a good quick alternative.

Exclusion List
The site map will include all public articles available on your Help Center. However, the following are excluded from the automatic site map list:
  1. Articles published for agents and registered users
  2. Article in the draft and pending review
  3. Expired articles


Also Read:    SEO for Help Center

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