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====== Creating a Site Map For Your Classified Ad or Auction Site ======

This can be problematic with dynamic sites where the content is constantly changing.  Within your classified ad and auction sites listings are constantly being inserted, expired and closed.  This makes static site map pages obsolete almost at the time they are created if done by outside software.  We have resisted the temptation to create a "site map" of all current auction and/or classified listings on the site as this can be quite a task for the software to create at once and can be too much of a draw on the site and overload some database servers on high traffic sites.  

To stop your site map visitors (ie search engines) from missing your latest content and getting errors when they try to visit links in your site map we suggest creating a page on your site that contains only category links.  Category urls do not change unless you manually delete a category in the CATEGORIES admin tool and so should never give a 404 error.  Also note that going to a category immediately displays the latest classified ad and auction listings on the first page of a category.  Thus always apprising search engines of your latest content not to mention constantly changing with the freshest listings. 

If you wish to create this kind of site map "within" your Geo software one of the extra pages available in your software as a site map should do as a start.  Using an extra page makes sure that page has access to modules within the system.  You may create a specific page template for this page if you wish or you can modify any of the current page templates you not using within the system.  You then need to do one of two things.  You will either need to insert a category navigation module within the main content area of that page template or using HTML manually create a list of links to all of your categories of your site.  

If you choose to use a category navigation module please note that you can set that module to display subcategories also.  Using this solution your site map automatically display the top two levels of categories within your site.  If you have only two levels of categories this should display them all but if not you may consider the other option described further below.  If you think humans will visit this page you can set the category counts to display within the module as well.  For further control of how the subcategories are displayed you can consult the category navigation modules documentation within this wiki [[admin_menu/page_modules/browsing/category_navigation/start#individual_controls_within_the_category_navigation_modules|here]].  This option also automatically updates if you create or delete categories in the system.

If you decide to manually create links to each of the categories you want within the site map you will not be able to display the classified ad or auction counts next to each category but you can possibly be more comprehensive in the categories you display if you have more than 2 levels of categories.  This option gives you more control over how categories are displayed and which categories are displayed if you do not wish to display them all.  But if you change any of the categories within the admin tool you will need to manually update this page within the new categories you add or the old categories you delete. 

We suggest using categories links within your site map page because once set in the software category links do not change unless you delete or add new categories within the admin tool which isn't near as often as classified ads or auctions are added/removed from the system.  You should be able to find more information about [[startup_tutorial_and_checklist:usability_configuration:category_browsing_configurations:creating_category_navigation_links|creating those category links manually using HTML here]].
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