Ensuring your DSpace is indexed

Anyone who has analyzed traffic to their DSpace site (e.g. using Google Analytics or similar) will notice that a significant (and in many cases a majority) of visitors arrive via a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. Hence, to help maximize the impact of content and thus encourage further deposits, it is important to ensure that your DSpace instance is indexed effectively.

DSpace comes with tools that ensure major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Google Scholar) are able to easily and effectively index all your content.

Ensuring your DSpace is indexed

Anyone who has analyzed traffic to their DSpace site (e.g. using Google Analytics or similar) will notice that a significant (and in many cases a majority) of visitors arrive via a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. Hence, to help maximize the impact of content and thus encourage further deposits, it is important to ensure that your DSpace instance is indexed effectively.

DSpace comes with tools that ensure major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Google Scholar) are able to easily and effectively index all your content. However, many of these tools provide some basic setup.  Here's how to ensure your site is indexed.

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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. Turn OFF any generation of PDF cover pages
8. 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.

Keep your DSpace up to date

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 45.0, the DSpace robots.txt file now includes references to Sitemaps by default (see DS-1936), and also blocks known bad bots (see DS-2335).
• As of DSpace 4.0, DSpace has provided several enhancements, which were 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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Once you've enabled your sitemaps, they will be accessible at the following URLs:

• HTML SitemapsXML Sitemaps / Sitemaps.org syntax: [dspace.url]/htmlmapsitemap
• HTML Google (XML) Sitemaps: [dspace.url]/sitemaphtmlmap

So, for example, if your "dspace.url = http://mysite.org/xmlui" in your "dspace.cfg" configuration file, then the HTML Sitemaps would be at: "http://mysite.org/xmlui/htmlmap"

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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.   By default, both the JSPUI and XMLUI provide these references in their robots.txt file. For example:

   Code Block
   Sitemap: http://my.dspace.url/sitemap Sitemap: http://my.dspace.url/htmlmap
   # The FULL URL to the DSpace sitemaps # XML sitemap is listed first as it is preferred by most search engines # Make sure to replace "[dspace.url]" with the value of your 'dspace.url' setting in your dspace.cfg file. Sitemap: [dspace.url]/sitemap Sitemap: [dspace.url]/htmlmap

   1. These
   2. 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)
   3. This "Sitemap:" 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
   4. Be sure to include the FULL URL in the "Sitemap:" line. Relative paths are not supported.

Search engines will now look at your Search engines will now look at your XML and HTML sitemaps, which 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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Ensure that your robots.txt file is at the top level of your site: i.e. at http://repo.foo.edu/robots.txt, and NOT e.g. http://repo.foo.edu/dspace/robots.txt. If your DSpace instance is served from e.g. http://repo.foo.edu/dspace/, you'll need to add /dspace to all the paths in the examples below (e.g. /dspace/browse-subject).

NEVER BLOCK THESE PATHS

Some URLs can be disallowed without negative impact, but be ABSOLUTELY SURE the following URLs can be reached by crawlers, i.e. DO NOT put these on Disallow: lines, or your DSpace instance might not be indexed properly.

NEVER BLOCK THESE PATHS

Some URLs can be disallowed without negative impact, but be ABSOLUTELY SURE the following URLs can be reached by crawlers, i.e. DO NOT put these on Disallow: lines, or your DSpace instance might not be indexed properly.

• /bitstream
• /browse  (UNLESS USING
• /bitstream
• /browse  (UNLESS USING SITEMAPS)
• /*/browse (UNLESS USING SITEMAPS)
• /browse-date (UNLESS USING SITEMAPS)
• /*/browse-date (UNLESS USING SITEMAPS)
• /community-list (UNLESS USING SITEMAPS)
• /handle
• /html
• /htmlmap

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Below is an example good robots.txt.  The highly recommended settings are uncommented.  Additional, optional settings are displayed in comments – based on your local configuration you may wish to enable them by uncommenting the corresponding "Disallow:" line.

User-agent: *
# DisableThe accessFULL URL to Discoverythe searchDSpace and filters
Disallow: /discover 
Disallow: /search-filter

# This should be the FULL URL to your HTML Sitemap.  sitemaps
# XML sitemap is listed first as it is preferred by most search engines
# Make sure to replace "[dspace.url]" with the value of your 'dspace.url' setting in your dspace.cfg file.
Sitemap: http://[dspace.url]/sitemap
Sitemap: [dspace.url]/htmlmap

##########################
# IfDefault you have configured DSpace (Solr-based) Statistics to be publicly accessible,Access Group
# then(NOTE: youblank likelylines doare not wantallowable thisin contenta to be indexed
# Disallow: /displaystats

# Uncomment the following line ONLY if sitemaps.org or HTML sitemaps are used
# and you group record)
##########################
User-agent: *
# Disable access to Discovery search and filters
Disallow: /discover
Disallow: /search-filter
# For JSPUI, replace "/search-filter" above with "/simple-search"
#
# Optionally uncomment the following line ONLY if sitemaps are working
# and you have verified that your site is being indexed correctly.
# Disallow: /browse
#
# YouIf alsoyou mayhave wishconfigured to disallow accessDSpace (Solr-based) Statistics to thebe following paths, in orderpublicly 
# toaccessible, stopthen webyou spidersmay fromnot accessingwant user-basedthis content:
# Disallow: /advanced-search to be indexed
# Disallow: /contactstatistics
# Disallow: /feedback
# You also may wish to disallow access to the following paths, in order
# to stop web spiders from accessing user-based content
# Disallow: /forgotcontact
# Disallow: /loginfeedback
# Disallow: /registerforgot
# Disallow: /searchlogin
# Disallow: /register

WARNING: Note that for your additional disallow statements to be recognized under the User-agent: * group, they can not cannot 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.

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

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: /displaystatsstatistics
Disallow: /advanced-searchcontact

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

For more information on the robots.txt format, please see the Google Robots.txt documentation.

Ensure Item Metadata appears in the HTML HEAD

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<meta content="Tansley, Robert; Donohue, Timothy" name="citation_authorsauthor" />
<meta content="Ensuring Donohue, Timothy" name="citation_author" />
<meta content="Ensuring your DSpace is indexed" name="citation_title" />


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These meta tags are the "Highwire Press tags" which Google Scholar recommends.  If you have heavily customized your metadata fields, or wish to change the default "mappings" to these Highwire Press tags, they are configurable in [dspace]/config/crosswalks/google-metadata.properties

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.

Scholar recommends.  If you have heavily customized your metadata fields, or wish to change the default "mappings" to these Highwire Press tags, they are configurable in [dspace]/config/crosswalks/google-metadata.properties

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.

Turn OFF any generation of PDF cover pages

While DSpace offers a PDF Citation Cover Page option, this option may affect your content's visibility in search engines like Google Scholar.  Google Scholar (and possibly other search engines) specifically extracts metadata by analyzing the contents of the first page of a PDF.  Dynamically inserting a custom cover page can break the metadata extraction techniques of Google Scholar and may result in all or much of your site being dropped from the Google Scholar search engine.

For more information, please see the "Indexing Repositories: Pitfalls and Best Practices" talk from Anurag Acharya (co-creator of Google Scholar) presented at the Open Repositories 2015 conferenceIf 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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