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1. Keep your DSpace up to date. We are constantly adding new indexing improvements in new releases
2. Ensure your DSpace is visible to search engines.
3. Enable the sitemaps feature – this does not require e.g. registering with Google Webmaster tools.
4. Ensure your robots.txt allows access to item "splash" pages and full text.
5. Ensure item metadata appears in HTML headers correctly.
6. Avoid redirecting file downloads to Item landing pages
7. As an aside, it's worth noting that OAI-PMH is generally not useful to search engines.  OAI-PMH has its own uses, but do not expect search engines to use it.

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We are constantly adding new indexing improvements to DSpace.  In order to ensure your site gets all of these improvements, you should strive to keep it up-to-date. For example:

• As of DSpace 4.0, DSpace has provided several enhancements, which were requested by the Google Scholar team. These included providing users (and web indexers) a way to browse content by the date it was added to DSpace (see DS-1482), ensuring the "dc.date.issued" field is set more accurately (see DS-1481), and enhancing the logic behind the "citation_pdf_url" HTML <meta> tag (see DS-1483)
• As of DSpace 1.7, DSpace has improved how its Item-level metadata is made available to Google Scholar. For the 1.7.0 release, the DSpace Developers worked directly with the Google Scholar developers, to ensure DSpace is generating the "citation_*" HTML "<meta>" tags (i.e. Highwire Press tags) that Google Scholar recommends in their Indexing Guidelines.
• As of DSpace 1.5, DSpace has support for sitemaps (both simple HTML pages of links, as well as the sitemaps.org protocol). It also includes item metadata in the HTML HEAD element of item display pages, ensuring that the metadata can be effectively indexed no matter what changes you might have made to your DSpace's layout or style.
• As of DSpace 1.4, DSpace has support for the "if-modified-since" HTTP header. This basically means that if an item (or bitstream therein) has not changed since the last time a search engine's crawler indexed it, that item/bitstream does not have to be re-retrieved, sparing your server.

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1. Provide a hidden link to the sitemaps in your DSpace's homepage. If you've customized your site's look and feel (as most have), ensure that there is a link to /htmlmap in your DSpace's front or home page.By default, both the JSPUI and XMLUI provide this link in the footer:

   Code Block
   <a href="/htmlmap"></a>

2. Announce your sitemap in your robots.txt.  Most major search engines will also automatically discover your sitemap if you announce it in your robots.txt file.  For example:

   Code Block
   Sitemap: http://my.dspace.url/sitemap Sitemap: http://my.dspace.url/htmlmap

   1. NOTE that you need to replace "http://my.dspace.url" lines above with the full URL of your DSpace instance (this should correspond to the "dspace.url" setting in your dspace.cfg file)
   2. This "Sitemap:" line lines can be placed anywhere in your robots.txt file.   You can also specify multiple "Sitemap:" lines, so that search engines can locate both formats. For more information, see: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#informing

Search engines will now look at /htmlmapyour XML and HTML sitemaps, which serves one or more serve pre-generated (and thus served with minimal impact on your hardware) XML or HTML files linking directly to items, collections and communities in your DSpace instance. Crawlers will not have to work their way through any browse screens, which are intended more for human consumption, and more expensive for the server.

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User-agent: *
# Disable access to Discovery search and filters
Disallow: /discover 
Disallow: /search-filter

# This should be the FULL URL to your HTML Sitemap.  
# Make sure to replace "[dspace.url]" with the value of your 'dspace.url' setting in your dspace.cfg file.
Sitemap: http://[dspace.url]/htmlmap

# If you have configured DSpace (Solr-based) Statistics to be publicly accessible,
# then you likely do not want this content to be indexed
# Disallow: /displaystats

# Uncomment the following line ONLY if sitemaps.org or HTML sitemaps are used
# and you have verified that your site is being indexed correctly.
# Disallow: /browse

# You also may wish to disallow access to the following paths, in order
# to stop web spiders from accessing user-based content:
# Disallow: /advanced-search
# Disallow: /contact
# Disallow: /feedback
# Disallow: /forgot
# Disallow: /login
# Disallow: /register
# Disallow: /search

Note that for your additional disallow statements to be recognized under the User-agent: * group, they can not be separated by white lines from the declared user-agent: * block. A white line indicates the start of a new user agent block. Without a leading user-agent declaration on the first line, blocks are ignored. Comment lines are allowed and will not break the user-agent block.

This is OK:

User-agent: *
# Disable access to Discovery search and filters
Disallow: /discover 
Disallow: /search-filter
Disallow: /displaystats
Disallow: /advanced-search

This is not OK, as the two lines at the bottom will be completely ignored.

User-agent: *
# Disable access to Discovery search and filters
Disallow: /discover 
Disallow: /search-filter
 
Disallow: /displaystats
Disallow: /advanced-search

To identify if a specific user agent has access to a particular URL, you can use this handy robots.txt tester.

Ensure Item Metadata appears in the HTML HEAD

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Much more information is available in the Configuration section on Google Scholar Metadata Mappings.

Avoid redirecting file downloads to Item landing pages

Make sure that you never redirect "direct file downloads" (i.e. users who directly jump to downloading a file, often from a search engine) to the associated Item's splash/landing page.  In the past, some DSpace sites have added these custom URL redirects in order to facilitate capturing statistics via Google Analytics or similar.

While these URL redirects may seem harmless, they may be flagged as cloaking or spam by Google, Google Scholar and other major search engines. This may hurt your site's search engine ranking or even cause your entire site to be flagged for removal from the search engine.

If you have these URL redirects in place, it is highly recommended to remove them immediately. If you created these redirects to facilitate capturing download statistics in Google Analytics, you should consider upgrading to DSpace 5.0 or above, which is able to automatically record bitstream downloads in Google Analytics (see DS-2088) without the need for any URL redirects.

In general, OAI-PMH is not useful to Search Engines

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