How do you add a sitemap to hubpages?
66This hub explains how to add a sitemap to your hubpage account.
Sitemaps Are Useful to Help Your Visitors and Search Engines Find Your Content
Why You Should Have a Site Map
A sitemap is a page (or a series of pages) that provides links to all the other pages on your site. In general there are two kinds of sitemaps: sitemaps that can be used and navigated easily by people and sitemaps that are meant to tell search engine spiders where to go on your site and how to find your content.
Both types of sitemaps are important. A well organized sitemap for your human visitors will help them locate your content and dig deeper into your site. This type of sitemap should group your content by themes and each link should have a descriptive title. Topics should be organized using an hierarchical structure. For example: you could group your links to pages about pets under the main heading "pets" and then have sub headings for different kinds of pets such as "cats" and "dogs".
Google recommends that each page on your site be reachable by at least one static link. A static link is a text link written in standard HTML syntax and not an image link, or a link using PHP or Javascript.
A sitemap for your search engine visitors is designed to let search engine crawlers or spiders, the bots that look for content on the internet, to quickly access your site's pages and index them. Because these visitors are machines, they read and interact with your site map differently. There are many different types of site maps for search engines, but because Google is the dominant search engine it is best to use a format that Googlebot likes.
Googlebot likes sitemaps in xml format. There are many free and paid tools that will let you build an xml sitemap ofr your site. One of the best tools also happens to be free. You can find the google site map generator here.
Sitemaps Help Users Navigate Your Site and Find Your Content
Adding a Sitemap to Hubpages
Now the bad news: it is not technically possible for you as an individual hubber to add a sitemap to Hubpages in the traditional sense. While Hubpages.com may maintain a sitemap of its site, you would find it difficult or impossible to create one because of the size of the site and the number of articles on it. Plus providing links to articles by other hubbers would not provide you with much benefit (unless you used url trackers, but that is the subject for another article).
So what can you do to add a sitemap to hubpages? The easiest way is to create a hub with links to all your pages. In other words create a hub of your hubs, which you can add to as you create more hubs. My friend DJ Funktual has done a great job at his hub called Hub Central Station.
So if you want to add a sitemap to your hubpages, the best thing to do is to create a hub (you can call it whatever you want) and add to it as you build more hubs. It's also a good idea to link to your hub from your profile or from other hubs that you write. For example your hubs could have a link that says: See more of my hubs and link to your site map.
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Thx, Quotations, you good looking hubber, you.
For those of us who are linking illiterate (& got a little lost when you started talking about code)....do we need to have unique url trackers for each link we use on a hub, regardless of its origin. i.e. if we insert a link to another hubber's page of like subject matter, click on the 'link' button on a hub, or a web link inserted to be helpful in one of our hubs.
I have absolutely no idea if any of my inserted links are connected to me (as far as hubpages is concerned), aside from the actual hubs I've written.
Is this as clear as mud? Sorry, it's hard to ask a succinct question when you don't know what or how to ask in order to find out what you want to know.
Thx for the article and advice.
Shirley
Hi Shirley
I think I understand your question. If this doesn't answer it, just let me know.
You do not need a different tracker for each link. But if you want to you can create a different tracker for every link just so you can keep track of eactly which link is getting clicked.
Here is the format for a link without a tracker:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Hub-pages-Traffic-Secrets
Here is a link to the same page but with a tracker inserted:
http://hubpages.com/_look/hub/Hub-pages-Traffic-Se
The tracker is the word "_look" just before the word "hub". Make sure to add an underscore before the tracker.
"look" is my tracker. So you would have to choose your own word and add it to your tracker list in your hubpages control panel.
The best way to know how to write the url of the page you wish to link to is to go that page and copy the address that displays in your internet browser's address bar. Then paste that into your article.
In answer to your second question, how to tell who is linking to you, there are a number of ways:
1. take the address of the page you wrote and google the address. If anyone has a link to you it will show up in the search results.
2. the traffic view in your hubpages control panel will show your traffic sources. If there is traffic from a particular site, they may have linked to you. Just visit the site shown and see if you can find a link to your site.
I hope this helps.
You're obviously not just another pretty face. This was terrifically helpful!
Thank-you so much!
Shirley :)
Thanks Shirley. Now I'm blushing.
so why is this Hub posted on funktual's site? along with one from Stacie...? G-Ma :o) hugs
I had been thinking of a way to link to all my hubs without having to use groups (which don't really do the same job). Creating a dedicated 'hub' hub is a great idea - I'm kicking myself for not thinking about it sooner.
Thanks!
Really helpful info that, I've been wondering how to do this for some time for my page http://hubpages.com/hub/compatibility-horoscope Thanks!
The PROBLEM is once you HAVE a sitemap of your HUBPAGES there is no way to get it INTO google because hubpages has no way for us to add the needed metatag!!!???
HELP anyone???!!!
Another question - does a sitemap HAVE to stay within just ONE url?? Why would it? Say you have what you want to call your *main* site and then you have branches off that site that are other domains???
The map seems pointless if it is simply a liniar index which is what everyone here seem to be saying but that is not what I am seeing researching sitemaps.
SUre! You can easily make a hubpages sitemap but what the h*ll GOOD is it when you cannot get it indexed by the SE because you can't use html or xml OR even put in one stinking metatag!!!!
AARRGGGGGG
Hi Privateeye2500 - sorry I took a while to answer your questions; I was on vacation.
It is not possible to create a classic sitemap on hubages. But what you can do is create a page that has links to your other hubs. This will at least increase the number of internal links pointing to your hubs and also will make it easier for googlebot to crawl your hubs because they will be easier to find.
If creating a map-like hubpage it is best to not just post links because google deprecates pages that are just links and not only ranks them lower, but may also penalize the pages that they point to. What works best, IMO is to create a hub that provides short summaries of your other hubs and then gives the link. Make sure that the summaries on the "sitemap" hub are not copied exactly from the original hub as otherwise you will be penalized for having duplicate content. Instead create a new summary using relevant key words related to your hub.
Yes, it is possible to break up your sitemaps into smaller sitemaps. Google on their website describes how you can create a sitemap that points to other sitemaps. If you have a lot of pages on your site, it is a good idea not to put all the links on one site map or single page since Google penalizes pages that have too many links on them. A good idea is to break up the site map by topic and subtopic.
I had no idea this could be done this way. I'm glad I stumbled upon this hub, great! Thanks.
I guess I should thank newcapo for discovering this - I'm so glad I followed him! Thanks for this - such an incredibly great idea!
good guide for me......i found it after seraching about 1 hours on internet
@smartblogger - I am glad that this helped. Another approach is to create what is called a capstone hub which deals with a specific topic (for example cars) and then links to other hubs by you about more in depth content (for example a hub about BMWs, another about Fords, etc) related to the capstone hub. This capstone hub will serve as the top level of a pyramid and provide links to your other hubs.
useful,indeed. I like the way you introduce.
Regarding writing a hub to link to all our pages - I thought we are not allowed more than 2 links to a domain, including ours; otherwise it will be flagged as overly promotional.
lee'sview 4 years ago
Thank you, I thought I was misssing something.
Thanks again
Lee