Most people know the importance of having a site map. A site map provides search engine spiders a complete list of categories and products to crawl and index. What many people still don't know is that there are two site map modules available for Miva Merchant store owners. Both have strengths and weaknesses.
Ability to specify the number of columns to display categories
Ability to specify the number of columns to display products
Ability to limit pages to 100k or less. This is important because Google and others don't like files over 100k in size. Once it hits the limit you set, it will create another file, and so on and so forth. It will link all the files together.
Ability to enter custom meta tags in head area. (<head></head>).
Ability to enter a custom global header and footer, category header and footer, and product header and footer.
Ability to use normal Miva Merchant urls (http://domain.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc) and Search Friendly Links (http://domain.com/page/storecode/).
Weaknesses:
The original developer, Copernicus, was bought by Miva Corporation. Support is essentially gone now.
No ability to use custom links in conjunction with .htaccess rewrite rules including the SEO Links module.
Ability to use normal Miva Merchant urls, Search Friendly Links, and SEO links including adding affiliate code.
Support is readily available.
Weaknesses:
No ability to enter custom meta tags in head tag area.
Multiple unneccessary meta tag fields.
No ability to layout categories or products in columns.
No option to just put list of links to other site map pages at the bottom of screen and not at the top.
No ability to use useful custom links in conjunction with .htaccess rewrite rules.
Which Module do I Recommend?
Although it is not as pretty, I would still recommend Swap Link because it has an option to work with SEO links.
A developer is about to release a module that works with Google's new site map feature. Look for a review in the next issue, or be alerted right on your computer with Mv Messenger.
