When visiting https://erpnext.com/sitemap.xml, the xml content is available. After I have generated a sitemap file at https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and uploaded the file to the public folder in this installation the same sitemap contents are not available and as expected the site returns “The page you are looking for is missing. This could be because it is moved or there is a typo in the link.”
I note a number of other discussions on this site -
At this discussion SEO & Startup Code - #10 by rmehta the issue of SEO is addressed, and at another url mention is made of a build in frappe / erpnext function to generate the sitemap.xml file from the command line.
I have been unable to build a sitemap.xml from the command line, instead the file was generated with an online generator and the file was uploaded to the the public directory. Using google site tools, Google was informed of the existence of the file, and the file was recognized.
I will monitor the index but so far it seems to resolve my issue on how to approach the google indexing by simply uploading a generated file in the public folder. The question now is whether a new file will need to be generated manually periodically and then uploaded.
I accept that search engines are clever enough to recognize ErpNext’s structure when crawling a site. Whether a sitemap.xml will have any specific advantage is a further open question.
On the other hand, the question of sitemaps and search engine index ranking is probably not part of this discussion -
… if you want Google to crawl every important page of your website. But sometimes, pages end up without any internal links pointing to them, making them hard to find. An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all, also helping it understand your website structure.
I also ran the site against two online SEO tools both before and after uploading the sitemap.xml file. The online audit tools were randomly chosen (https://www.metaforensics.io/ and https://seositecheckup.com/tools/structured-data-test). In both cases there was no discernible difference in the results as between the availability or not of a sitemap.xml. In both cases the erpnext site was perfectly fine.
Thank you for the earlier above reply.