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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• XML Sitemaps / Sitemaps.org syntax: [dspace.url]/sitemap
• HTML Sitemaps: [dspace.url]/htmlmap

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

   Code Block
   #
   Code Block
   # 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 "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
   2. Be sure to include the FULL URL in the "Sitemap:" line. Relative paths are not supported.

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<meta content="Tansley, Robert; " name="citation_author" />
<meta content="Donohue, Timothy" name="citation_authorsauthor" />
<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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