ENH: Add a SiteMap specific to the forums #1558
Description
Is your feature request related to a problem?
Right now, the Community Forums module does not expose its content through a dedicated sitemap provider. This means forum threads and posts may not be consistently discoverable by search engines. As a result, valuable user-generated content can remain under-indexed, limiting visibility and discoverability for both site owners and end users.
Describe the solution you'd like
I would like the Community Forums module to implement a sitemap provider, similar to how other DNN modules can register content with the global sitemap. The provider should surface forum threads (and ideally, recent posts) in a structured way so that search engines can crawl them more efficiently. This would allow forum content to be included in /sitemap.aspx and also potentially broken out into a dedicated forums-sitemap.xml if needed.
(Ideally, it's own sitemap URL.)
Describe alternatives you've considered
- Relying solely on internal linking within the forum, but this doesn’t guarantee full crawl coverage, especially for large or deeply nested forums.
- Creating a custom provider or using a third-party SEO sitemap module, but these require extra setup and aren’t as seamless as having this support built into the Forums module itself.
Additional context
- Separate sitemap segments (e.g., forums-only) help site owners diagnose indexing issues in Google Search Console more easily by isolating forum content.
- Large forums can quickly hit XML sitemap size limits; having a provider allows automatic segmentation and better crawl compliance.
- While sitemap inclusion doesn’t directly improve rankings, it significantly improves the likelihood that valuable forum content is indexed quickly and reliably.
- This enhancement would bring the Forums module up to par with modern SEO best practices and improve the visibility of community discussions in search engines.