Search Engines

Lamb helps search engines and other crawlers discover your content out of the box. It generates a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt automatically — there is nothing to configure and no files to drop in by hand.

Available endpoints

Path Purpose
/sitemap.xml Lists every public URL for crawlers
/robots.txt Allows crawling, points at the sitemap, hides admin paths

Sitemap

/sitemap.xml is a standard sitemaps.org document. It lists the home page followed by every publicly visible post and page, newest first, each with a <lastmod> timestamp taken from when the post was last updated.

It contains exactly what an anonymous visitor can see, so it omits:

Unlike the timeline, the sitemap does include menu-item pages (such as an “About” page) — they are real public URLs worth indexing.

The sitemap is cached and supports conditional requests, so crawlers that revisit it only re-download it when your content has actually changed.

robots.txt

/robots.txt allows crawling, advertises the sitemap, and asks crawlers not to waste time on the private routes — the login-gated admin pages and actions (/settings, /edit, /drafts, /trash, /scheduled, /delete, /restore, /upload, /checkbox) plus the internal /login, /logout, and /_cron endpoints. The list is derived automatically from the routes themselves, so it stays complete as the app grows. Those routes already require a login (or are internal), so this is a hint to crawlers rather than a security control.

Overriding robots.txt

If you want full control, drop your own robots.txt into the web root (the src/ directory, next to index.php). When that file exists Lamb serves it verbatim and skips the generated one, so your version always wins.

Submitting your site

Point a search engine’s webmaster tools (for example Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools) at https://your-site/sitemap.xml.

Many of those tools can also ingest a feed directly, so as an alternative — or in addition — you can give them your Atom or JSON feed. The sitemap is the broadest signal (it lists every public page, not just recent posts), so it is the recommended starting point.

  • Feeds — Atom / JSON Feed, also accepted by many webmaster tools
  • Menu Items — pages that the sitemap includes but the timeline hides
  • Scheduling and Drafts — content the sitemap deliberately leaves out

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