While preparing next big release of Engrave platform, we are continuously developing and introducing necessary features and fixes for our users. One of those features were XML Sitemaps to boost our users' blogs positions in search results and allow bots to crawl and index articles much faster.
And as always, you can find our source code on our Github.
What are XML Sitemaps
A sitemap is a special document created for a specific website. It contains every URL that should become indexed by search engines. It uses special syntax, called XML, to serve pieces of information that could be interpreted by bots and web crawlers. It's like a "Table of content" for a website or a blog.
Why you should use a Sitemap
Web crawlers want to index every page of every website but sometimes it's hard to find some of the URLs. For example, if you have a new blog without external linking to your articles.
Having sitemap with URL to every article is crucial for better Search Results visibility. Steemit links are getting indexed quite fast because of "old" domain (it exists for over 2,5 years) but new blogs - don't. So you need to boost it manually, using appropriate mechanism recommended by Google itself.
How to use Sitemap
Engrave will automatically create Sitemap for your blog and will update it whenever you make changes (like adding or removing an article). Sitemaps are available at /sitemap.xml URL, which means that for our official blog, the sitemap URL will look like that:
https://blog.engrave.website/sitemap.xml
Next, you need to add it to Google Search Console. Create an account, if you don't have one and click "Add property". Select "URL prefix" and fill the form with your blog URL. Use https:// prefix and type entire address.
Then, you will be asked to verify ownership for a website you're trying to add. It's quite simple - just click HTML Tag, copy only the "content" part as it is highlighted on this screenshot below.
Open a new tab, log in into Engrave Dashboard, navigate to Statistics and paste selected text into GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS TAG VERIFICATION CODE CONTENT field and save it.
Go back to Google Search Console and click Verify. If it quickly failed - wait few seconds and try again - Engrave need a few seconds to refresh blog settings.
You should see confirmation for successful ownership verification.
Navigate to "Sitemaps", enter sitemap.xml into the appropriate field and click the "Submit" button. Your sitemap will be automatically added and fetched by Google Bot.
Refresh page to get a new status. Your sitemap has been added to Search Console and from this on, Google bot will periodically fetch it to get the newest articles to crawl automatically. Your pages should get indexed much faster than previously and it may lead even to better search results positions (but it's not guaranteed).
Thanks for using Engrave!