Search Engine Indexing

In a default CalmView setup, search engines link to your copy of CalmView as a whole, but not individual pages (for individual records) within that page. If you want Google or other search engines to be able to find individual items, you will need to edit the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file tells search engines like Google how to read your CalmView site. You will need to edit it so that it points at your CalmView site's sitemap, then save the file in the proper location. A sitemap is basically an index of the pages on a website in a form easily understood by search engines, helping them to find pages on the site.

To update the robots.txt File

Start on the web server that holds your CalmView files:

• Navigate to the folder /inetpub/wwwroot/CalmView
• Open the file txt in Notepad (or another plain text editor)

• Delete the '#' and the space (' ') before 'Sitemap'
• Replace 'www.myserver.com' with the domain name of your CalmView site's address (the part after 'http://' and before '/sitemap.ashx' which ends with a top-level domain like '.ac.uk' or '.com'), for example 'archives.hemdon.gov.uk' or 'calmview.hemdon.ac.uk'

• Click File on the menu bar
• Click Save As...
• Navigate to the highest-level folder of your CalmView site (this is most likely inetpub/wwwroot)
• Click the drop-down box next to 'Encoding'

• Click 'ANSI'
• Click OK

Note: It is okay to overwrite a previous robots.txt file this way, but you may want to make a backup of that file before doing so.

If your organisation has multiple CalmView sites, you can link to the sitemaps of each of them in a single robots.txt file, as below:

Note: Indexing is not an instant process; it may take some time for your CalmView site to be fully indexed by search engines.

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