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Please be aware that individual search engines also have their own guidelines and recommendations for inclusion. While the guidelines below apply to most DSpace sites, you may also wish to review these guidelines for specific search engines:
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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.
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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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:
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<a href="/htmlmap"></a> |
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:
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# 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 |
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.
The trick here is to minimize load on your server, but without actually blocking anything vital for indexing. Search engines need to be able to index item, collection and community pages, and all bitstreams within items – full-text access is critically important for effective indexing, e.g. for citation analysis as well as the usual keyword searching.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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