Photo Gallery Forums

The sitemap at https://www.danielbollinger.de/sitemap/ only shows two pages, while clearly there are more. There are no noindex or nofollow attributes set in page SEO settings. Is there another place I may have accidentally set something to noindex?

I can't understand why that can be. I would need to ask for panel login to make some tests ...

I think I found the explanation. In almost all your pages, you have assigned a "LINK", which means the page does not exist as a page. I find it a bit strange, as pages like "projekte" and "danielbollinger" point to "/", which means they points to your home page. Links won't get indexed, of course because they point to other pages, and often external pages. Then you have pages like /unternehmensfotografie/ which points to /projekte/unternehmensfotografie/ ... I don't quite see the point of this.

In any case, as long as you have populated LINK for a page, it will not show in the sitemap ... What would it display? The link location? It can't do that, because links may point anywhere, to external urls, url's that don't exist, or url's that are already indexed as real pages.

Ok, I understand. This was my solution for the following:

I want my menu to show the three categories Architecture, Portraits, Corporate directly, not in a dropdown.
I want the homepage to show these three folders.
I don't want these folders to exist twice.
I don't want people to be able to visit the level above  – that's why I redirect them to index.

Maybe I made things unneccessarily complicated and there's another solution to achieve this?
For now I will pass on the last one, because there's probably next to no one who would manually go there.

mjau-mjau wrote: I think I found the explanation. In almost all your pages, you have assigned a "LINK", which means the page does not exist as a page.

So I removed all the links to /, but the sitemap still only shows two pages.

Edit: Nevermind, the old sitemap was still cached.

metallissimus wrote:I want my menu to show the three categories Architecture, Portraits, Corporate directly, not in a dropdown.
I want the homepage to show these three folders.

Of course, these menu items will show on ALL pages, not just the home page. The question is, if you want them in the topbar, on that level, then why not just have /portraits/ as a page and that's that? Why do you need to have a page /projecte/portraits/ where you are redirecting this page to? Since your folder /projects/ is hidden, X3 will not include pages inside there into the sitemap.

mjau-mjau wrote: The question is, if you want them in the topbar, on that level, then why not just have /portraits/ as a page and that's that?

Honestly, I can't remember why I set it up this way. There probably was some issue I didn't know how to solve otherwise. So you're saying if I move all my folders from /projekte/ to / (and of course adjust some settings accordingly) I will have the optically and functionally same state as currently?

Edit: I think I remember, it could have something to do with the Page Navigation plugin. I have page navigation hidden for root pages, but I wanted to have it available for the categories.

metallissimus wrote:Honestly, I can't remember why I set it up this way. There probably was some issue I didn't know how to solve otherwise. So you're saying if I move all my folders from /projekte/ to / (and of course adjust some settings accordingly) I will have the optically and functionally same state as currently?

Well, I didn't study all the "links" for your pages, and I'm not 100% sure what exactly was the idea. Essentially, all "pages" in your X3 website "should" be physical folders, as that's how it's supposed to work. If you want /projekte/ in the top-level main menu, then yes you should definitely move that folder and remove the "link" workaround.

metallissimus wrote:Edit: I think I remember, it could have something to do with the Page Navigation plugin. I have page navigation hidden for root pages, but I wanted to have it available for the categories.

There is an OPTION for this in Settings > plugins > page nav. And if the options do not fulfill your requirements, it would probably be better to use CSS to show/hide page navigation on a custom basis.

mjau-mjau wrote: If you want /projekte/ in the top-level main menu, then yes you should definitely move that folder and remove the "link" workaround.

Maybe there was a misunderstanding. I want the child-folders of /projekte/ in the top-level menu and visible on the home page.
I moved them to / now and they're in the menu, but they no longer show on the home page. Maybe that was the reason for my setup? Can you only show folders on the home page if you load them via Folders > Advanced?

Ok, you mean assigned to folder "assets" on the home page ... That could be a reason to contain some items inside a /projekte/ folder ... Thing is, a key concept in X3 is to reflect the physical folder structure as pages and menu. Although you can create links (like you did), this won't resolve automatically in sitemaps for example ... In your specific case, the issue is compounded by the fact that you have hidden the /projekte/ folder, so X3 cannot assume that pages inside should be in the sitemap ... Then it would need to include all hidden pages. My suggestions:

• Just ignore the sitemap? Or even disable it? There is no reason to believe that Google or any other modern search engine will not find your pages without a sitemap.xml file.
• Create sitemap manually. I can't see why you would need this though, as Google will find the few links you have.
• Just make /projekte/ visible in the menu? Pages will display in sitemap.
• Revert to pure physical structure. I'm not sure it's worth creating such an abstract structure just to maintain a few automated links on the index page. Maybe you can add those 2-3 links manually into your index "content" ...

Thank you for your suggestions, I will think about what's the best way to do this for me.

mjau-mjau wrote:Just ignore the sitemap? Or even disable it? There is no reason to believe that Google or any other modern search engine will not find your pages without a sitemap.xml file.

I will go with this one. I wasn't really aware of how unimportant a sitemaps seems to be. Thanks again!