Google Sitemaps are an effective way to let Google know which pages of your website are available for indexing. Though they go to great lengths to point out that submitting a sitemap is only a suggestion, and not a command, Google does use your sitemap to provide insights into how your website is being indexed and found by web searchers.

Here’s how I added a Google Sitemap for Moral Metric in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

First, I made sure that my HomeController was defined as a resource in my routes.rb file:

map.resource :home

My HomeController is very sparse – it only has one public method: index. I wanted to have my application return XML when Google asked for XML, so rather than adding a new method, I used Rails’ respond_to blocks:

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def index
  respond_to do |format|
    @things = Thing.find(:all)
    format.html {}
    format.xml {render :partial => "sitemap", :layout => false}
  end
end

Easy enough. Then I created an RXML file in app/views/home/sitemap.rxml. Here I constructed my sitemap code according to Google’s Sitemap Protocol, which is very simple. The file looks something like this:

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xml.instruct!
xml.urlset "xmlns" => "http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" do

  # Provide your site's homepage
  xml.url do
    xml.loc         "http://www.moralmetric.com/"
    xml.lastmod     w3c_date @articles.last.updated_at
    xml.changefreq  "hourly"
    xml.priority    "1.0"
  end

  # You can hand-specify important sub-sections of your site
  xml.url do
    xml.loc         "http://www.moralmetric.com/things"
    xml.lastmod     w3c_date @things.last.updated_at
    xml.changefreq  "daily"
    xml.priority    "0.9"
  end

  # You can iterate over items in your site, providing a link to each page
  @things.each do |thing|
    xml.url do
      xml.loc         thing_url(thing)
      xml.lastmod     w3c_date thing.updated_at
      xml.changefreq  "daily"
    end
  end

The w3c_date helper method is a convenience method from Codeism, to whom I also owe thanks for the inspiration for this technique.

That’s it! Now, going to /home.xml will pull up your newly minted XML format Google sitemap.

You could also ping Google each time something new is posted. See here.

Resources:

• http://www.codeism.com/archive/show/578
• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html
• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
• http://bdash.net.nz/blog/2005/08/25/google-sitemaps-in-rails/