Learn Building a Sitemap in Rails from Scratch for Heroku

Dynamic sitemaps are very easy to build in rails and can vastly improve your organic SEO.  In just 10 minutes, your web application can have a dynamic sitemap that is always up-to-date. 

Let me first give props to the sitemap_generator gem. This is a great project and useful in many situations, but sometimes it’s better to just build your sitemap from scratch. One of the biggest drawbacks is that it can’t be used on Heroku, unless you want to host the sitemap on a cloud service like S3 with carrierwave and fog - that’s at least 3 new gems just for a sitemap. To me, this seems like a lot of overhead for a relatively minor concern. In this lesson, I’ll show you how to build a simple sitemap without any external dependencies. We will also setup an simple rake task to ping Google or any other search engine. 

Here's What We're Going to Code

1. A Ruby on Rails view and controller that will format XML to match Google's sitemap guidelines. 
2. A custom rake task to ping google when our sitemap changes.

Other Important Info

• This tutorial uses Rails 4.2 and Ruby 2.2 (but works with any version of rails 4+)
• You should know the basics of Rails before starting this lesson. 
• I'm offering this lesson for free!

According to Google’s Sitemap guidelines, this is the preferred XML markup for a sitemap. 

<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?>
<urlset xmlns=“http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9”> 
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.codediode.io</loc> 
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.codediode.io/about</loc> 
  </url>
</urlset>