Easy Google Sitemap with REST in Rails

February 21st, 2007

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:

Posted by Ryan Filed in Blog

5 Responses to “Easy Google Sitemap with REST in Rails”

  1. Robert Says:
    February 21st, 2007 at 11:39 PM

    Another cool tip, Ryan!

    One suggestion, when using singular resources, it is best to define them in your routes as map.resource :home.

    Check this out – http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/2/6/rails-1-2-2-sqlite3-gems-singular-resources

  2. Ryan Says:
    February 22nd, 2007 at 12:08 PM

    Thanks Robert – that’s a good find! I’ve updated the code in the example.

  3. mixhere Says:
    June 20th, 2007 at 10:02 AM

    thanks a lot. But I changed a little _sitemap.rxml instead of sitemap.rxml use an independent controller sitemap the only method in sitemap controller is show rather than index see http://www.mixhere.com/sitemap thanks again

  4. mixhere Says:
    June 20th, 2007 at 10:02 AM

    thanks a lot. But I changed a little _sitemap.rxml instead of sitemap.rxml use an independent controller sitemap the only method in sitemap controller is show rather than index see http://www.mixhere.com/sitemap thanks again

  5. r38ixqdk7y Says:
    July 19th, 2007 at 04:44 AM

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