Hi,
I think that this Sitemap tool is really useful, but I’ve discovered a problem. It does not co-exist well with a site that is using the SEO Strict URL plug-in. Since both tools are tailored towards SEO enthusiasts, I think it is likely that someone will try to use both on their site.
Here’s the deal...The SEO Strict URL plugin is re-writing all of the URLs. So for example on my site I like the look of base name only with no extension.
I prefer:
http://seoconductor.com/about
and not:
http://seoconductor.com/about.html
So, in my sitemap I want all of my important pages to be listed just as I am presenting them to the public (without the extension).
The problem is that while I am presenting them without extension to the public, the Sitemap plug-in is unaware of the rewrite that is being done by the Strict URL plug-in. The result is that it lists all of the documents in the sitemap with .html extension. Then when googlebot looks at the sitemap it will find that every single URL in the sitemap is being is being 301 redirected and complain.
I found a temp workaround for this if you want to use Base Name and the Sitemap Snippet:
1. Turn off the "Suffix for URLs" setting in Modx Config. I.E. clear the ".html" setting.
2. Configure your docs to use "Base Name" via the Strict URL plug-in.
This isn’t ideal though, because you won’t be able to utilize the SEO Strict Override TV to "append extension" for select documents. What happens is it will have nothing to append since it takes this extension from the MODX "Suffix For URL" setting that we already cleared. In this case I found another workaround...for the specific doc that you need to have the extension just change the doc alias such that it has .html at the end.
What I’d love to see is a way to make these two plug-ins more aware of each other. Over time I tend to forget all these workarounds I put in place.
Is there any way to code the sitemap snippet to check for the SEO Strict configuration before appending a doc to the sitemap?
Thanks,
-Brian