I’m creating a site that is going to have a wiki article database. Right now, there aren’t any links into the wiki articles other than using the on site search engine.
How can I get the articles to be spidered by Google and the other Internet search engines? There are far too many articles in the database to directly include links to them all unless it’s some type of automated site map.
On a lot of wikis I’ve seen a view a random page button; I’ve never seen the point of those myself as a user, are those there to help the search engine bots?
You could write a PHP or ASP script that generates a sitemap, and redirect requests to /sitemap.xml to that script.
You can then submit the sitemap to Google using their Webmaster Tools.