SMAP question

[Robin]

Yes, I am not the brightest bulb in the closet. Gungho about the new 5.5 functionalities I created a SMAP page in MIVA. Duh! I have one already external to the storefront. Simple solution was to delete the page in Miva...it won't let me. I can only imagine that this is not a good thing. Any thoughts on how to rectify this? Thanks as always for your help. Robin

[Nerd Boy Inc]

Dear Master Chief,

Are you getting an Error, if so which one?

[Robin]

When I try to remove the page from admin, I get "The SMAP is req'd by the user interface and cannot be removed".
I am not sure if it's something I should worry about or not...? I think so. :)

[Rick Wilson]

What happens if you go back to SEO Settings under Global Settings -> Domain Settings and uncheck the sitemap feature?

[Robin]

Actually that was the very first thing I did. It "unchecked" fine. Then figured, well it made the page, so I'll go to pages and just remove it. Negits. I get that warning.

[Rick Wilson]

K, I'll check on our side to see why this is behaving this way.

If you're not linking to this wayward SMAP, I'm 90% sure it's harmless (since the spiders won't find it) but since I'm not an actual SEO expert, I'll defer the other 10% of my certainty :)

[Robin]

Thank you!

[Mark Johnson]

Rick is right. If you are not linking to it anywhere, it will never get accessed. Hence it can do you no harm.

Having said that, you ought to be able to delete it if your not using it. But you should probably have to uncheck the box to do so. I'll look into why it's behaving this way and how we can fix it.

[Robin]

mark, thank you. So I am not going to worry about it being "out there" and conflicting with the real site map. You are right though, it's a page, and I should be able to delete it. I reverified that it was unchecked in admin, tried to nuke it again, but with the same error. Again thanks.

[Mark Johnson]

I talked this over with Alex today, to review our thought processes when we implemented the SMAP. We decided to make it an immutable page (fancy term for can't be deleted) because there were more issues if we allowed it to be deleted.

So I just want to repeat, the SMAP page can never do you any harm. It will never be accessed unless you create an explicit link to it. We never create a link to it, because the merchant will always want to control the link placement exactly.

[Robin]

Great. I sincerely thank you for confirming that it won't do any harm or conflict.

[Robin]

Thought I replied to this yesterday, but wanted to say thank you again for all who looked at this and eased my mind. Tks, Robin

[papi34]

Rick is right. If you are not linking to it anywhere, it will never get accessed. Hence it can do you no harm.

Having said that, you ought to be able to delete it if your not using it. But you should probably have to uncheck the box to do so. I'll look into why it's behaving this way and how we can fix it.

I find myself in a similar situation as Robin. I unchecked the SEO box that enables the sitemap, and I was surprised to see that the SMAP.html page was still accessible...and I cannot delete the SMAP page! I'm by no means an expert, but I’m not convinced that "it will never get accessed". Particularly since the whole point of it being created was for it to get accessed or crawled by the google bots. Is there a fix in the works to be able to delete this page? What were the issues that you alluded to wrt allowing the page to be deleted?

What exactly does unchecking that box do anyway?

[Pete McNamara]

If there are no links to the Site Map page, how will it be accessed? When you uncheck the box, the links to the Site Map page are removed so search engines won't be spidering it.

[Leanne]

Is it not true that when you visit pages using a browser that has the Google toolbar installed, it will add those pages to its index? I have had development sites that had no external links show up in search results, and I suspect this was the reason. Anyway, if someone visited the Site Map page with the toolbar and it got indexed, would it ever get "un-indexed?"

[iMarks]

If there is a concern as to whether it would be indexed, you could delete the SMAP template code (have a blank template), or insert template code to redirect to another page, or set up a .htaccess rule to redirect the SMAP page. Or add it to the robots.txt Disallow section.

[Mark Johnson]

Sounds like time for me to chime in and clear up a few points.

First here is how it currently works. The first time that you check the Site Map box in SEO Settings and hit update, the SMAP page template is created. There are no links created to this page. If you subsequently uncheck the box and hit update, there is no effect.

Now for the implications of how it currently works. The Site Map is of no value unless there are links to it. But where to put those links and how they look is a design issue, so we leave that up to the merchant. We recommend putting a Site Map link in the global header or global footer so that it will be linked to from every store page. Second best would be to put a link on the store front page to keep the Site Map a short click distance from the entry to your store.

Generally speaking if there are no links to your Site Map, then the search engine bots will not find it. I don't know the answer to the Google toolbar question that Leanne raised. But I do know that one of Google's most important criteria for ranking pages is the number of links to a page from other pages. So if there are no links to a page and Google were somehow still able to become aware of it, the page would still rank extremely low.

Finally here's how we plan to change the Site Map. We will fix it so when the check box is unchecked, the SMAP page will become inactive. We don't want to delete the page because then a merchant who modified the template, then turned it off and later back on again would lose the changes made.

[Pete McNamara]

If there are no links to the Site Map page then even if you examine the page with the Google toolbar installed, it will not be indexed. It is possible it may be spidered once or twice (I haven't seen that myself though), but not indexed.