Providing a sitemap to the search engines basically gives them an inventory of the pages in your site. It’s useful in helping them to find and index older and possibly orphaned content in your website that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to find.

Basic XML Sitemap Setup

• First, download the Google Sitemap module for Drupal. Upload the gsitemap folder to your Drupal installation into sites/all/modules. If the modules folder doesn’t exist, you may need to create it.
• Once you’ve uploaded the module, go to Administer | Site Building | Modules, and activate the module labelled XML Sitemap.
• Now, you’ll need to configure the module. Got to Administer | Site Configuration | XML Sitemap and set the options accordingly. By default, the “Submit To Google” option is selected, but you might also want to automatically submit to Yahoo! and Ask. In fact, I recommend it. You should also select to submit sitemap when the site is updated and when cron is run. Cron tasks in Drupal automatically perform regular maintenance on your Drupal installation. It’s recommended to set this up. (I may cover this in a later article)

Problems I Encountered During Sitemap Configuration

After following those ‘default’ steps to setup, I attempted to access my sitemap. No luck, it gave a parse error in FireFox. Upon further investigation, the file was empty. So the sitemap hadn’t been generated. If you encounter this problem, try these steps:

• Browse to Administer | Site Configuration | File System.
• In the Temporary Directory box, remove the forward-slash character from the start of /tmp. Save the new settings. You should see a notice that “The directory tmp has been created”
• Try to access your sitemap file again (should be at http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). This time you should see the sitemap that has been generated.
• Now that the sitemap has been created, you can force a cron run to ping Google, Yahoo! and Ask. Simply visit Administer | Logs | Status Reports and click the link that says “run cron manually”. Follow this up by viewing the Recent Log Entries Report where you should see a number of entries confirming submission to the various search engines.

For bonus points, you could (and should) configure your robots.txt file for sitemap autodiscovery.