Requires WordPress Version: 2.6 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.2
This plugin dynamically creates feeds that comply with the XML Sitemap and the Google News Sitemap protocol. It is Multi-Site and Multi-Lingual compatible and there are no options to be set nor file or dir access rights to be tampered with.
You or your site owners on your Multi-site network will not be bothered with complicated settings like other XML Sitemap plugins. XML sitemap values like ChangeFreq and URL Priority is auto-calculated based on post age and comment activity.
The feeds become instantly available: One XML Sitemap on yourblogurl.tld/sitemap.xml (or yourblogurl.tld/?feed=sitemap), ready for indexing by search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and others. And one Google News Sitemap on yourblogurl.tld/sitemap-news.xml (or yourblogurl.tld/?feed=sitemap-news), ready for indexing by Google News. Both are automatically referenced in the dynamically created robots.txt on yourblogurl.tld/robots.txt to tell search engines where to find your XML Sitemaps.
Compatible with caching plugins like Super Cache, W3 Total Cache and Quick Cache that cache feeds, allowing better performance to serve the hungry (impatient) spider.
qTranslate and xLanguage compatible! Tested in Pre-Path Mode and Query Mode. Each language on your site will have its own XML Sitemap.
NOTES:
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If you do not use fancy URL’s or you have WordPress installed in a subdirectory, a dynamic robots.txt will NOT be generated. You’ll have to create your own and upload it to your site root! See FAQ’s.
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On large sites, it is advised to use a good caching plugin like Quick Cache, WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache to improve your site and sitemap performance.
Advantages
- The main advantage of this plugin over other XML Sitemap plugins is simplicity. No need to change file or folder permissions, move files or spend time on a difficult plugin options page. In fact, there are no options at all!
- Completely automatic post URL priority and change frequency calculation based on post age and comment and trackback activity.
- Works out-of-the-box, even on multi-site / shared codebase / multi-blog setups like WordPress MU, WP 3.0 in MultiSite (WPMS) mode and others.
- Also works upon Network Activate or placed in /mu-plugins/ on WP 3.0 in MS mode and WPMU and even takes care to exclude any tags blogs to avoid malus points for link spamming.
- Compatible with multi-lingual sites using qTranslate or xLanguage to allow all languages to be indexed equally.
Limitations
- The feed contains the front page and all posts and pages but excludes category, tag and other dynamic archive pages. This should not be a problem and by most it is even advised to exclude them. There are SEO plugins around that actively block these archive pages from search engines.
- Except by re-saving older posts from time to time (keeping the lastmod date fairly recent) there is no way to manually control the priority of individual posts/pages in the sitemap. See the Faq’s for more.
- This plugin does not ping any search engines. But then, WordPress does this by default already via the Ping-o-Matic service so why bother? See the Faq’s for more.
- Because the feed is dynamically created, on very large sites the creation process might take a while. Search engines are said to have a short fuse about waiting for a sitemap, so you may want to consider using a cache plugin that also (pre)caches feeds. If you are unfamiliar with caching and server setup start with an easy caching plugin such as Quick Cache. For more options (and better performance?) you might find solace in WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.
Translations
There is nothing to translate. The sitemap protocol is international, there is no options page nor any front-end or widget output. Nothing to see here, please move along 
Plugin developers
Since 3.8.5, there is a FILTER hook xml_sitemap_url available that lets you filter the URL for the sitemap reference in the generated robots.txt and the home URL in the sitemap. It sends both string (for single url) and array (for multiple urls) and should receive the same. See pre-packaged examples of it’s use in xml-sitemap.php for the qTranslate and xLanguage plugins.
Credits
XML Sitemap Feed was originally based on the (discontinued?) plugin Standard XML Sitemap Generator by Patrick Chia. Many thanks! Since then, it has been completely rewritten and extended in many ways.
Installation Instructions
WordPress
Quick installation: Install now !
… OR …
Search for “xml sitemap feed” and install with that slick Plugins > Add New back-end page.
… OR …
Follow these steps:
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Download archive.
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Upload the zip file via the Plugins > Add New > Upload page … OR … unpack and upload with your favourite FTP client to the /plugins/ folder.
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Activate the plugin on the Plug-ins page.
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If you have been using another XML Sitemap plugin before, check your site root and remove any created sitemap.xml file that remained there.
Done! Check your sparkling new XML Sitemap by visiting yourblogurl.tld/sitemap.xml (adapted to your domain name ofcourse) with a browser or any online XML Sitemap validator. You might also want to check if the sitemap is listed in your yourblogurl.tld/robots.txt file.
WordPress 3+ in Multi Site mode
Same as above but do a Network Activate to make a XML sitemap available for each site on your network.
WordPress MU
The plugin works best from the /mu-plugins/ folder where it runs quietly in the background without bothering any blog owner with new options or the need for special knowledge of XML Sitemap submission. Just upload the complete package content to /mu-plugins/ and move the file xml-sitemap.php from the new /mu-plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/ to /mu-plugins/.
Installed alongside WordPress MU Sitewide Tags Pages, XML Sitemap Feed will not create a sitemap.xml nor change robots.txt for any tag blogs. This is done deliberately because they would be full of links outside the tags blogs own domain and subsequently ignored (or worse: penalised) by Google.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get my latest articles listed on Google News?
Go to Suggest News Content for Google News and submit your website info as detailed as possible there. Give them the URL(s) of your fresh new Google News Sitemap in the text field ‘Other’ at the bottom.
You will also want to add the sitemap to your Google Webmasters Tools account to check its validity and performance. Create an account if you don’t have one yet.
My Google News Sitemap is empty!
The rules of the Google News game are that you do not feed the cookie monster any stale food. Older than 2 days is bad. You need to bake him some fresh bread
How are the values for priority and changefreq calculated?
The front page has a fixed priority of 100% (1.0). When your site has more posts than pages (you must be using WordPress for a blog), pages have a default priority of 40% (0.4) and posts have a default priority of 80% (0.8). If your site has more pages than posts (you must be using WordPress as CMS), pages have a default priority of 80% (0.8) and posts have a default priority of 40% (0.4).
Page and post priority can vary between 0% (0.0) and 100% (1.0). Page priority depends on the page level (decreasing 10% for each sub-level) and relative number of comments. Post priority depends on relative number of comments and relative last comment age or (when the post has no comments) last post modification age.
The changefreq of the front page is fixed to daily and calculated for pages and post to either daily, weekly, monthly or yearly depending on age and comment activity.
Dynamic pages like category pages, tag pages and archive pages are not listed in the XML Sitemap.
Can I manipulate values for priority and changefreq?
Yes and No. This plugin has no options page so there is no way to manually set the priority of urls in the sitemap. But there is automatic post priority calculation based on post modifaction date and comment activity, that can either make post priority go to 100% (1.0) for posts with many and recent comments or 0% (0) for the oldest posts with no comments.
This feature can be used to your advantage: by re-saving your most important older posts from time to time, keeping the lastmod date fairly recent, you can ensure a priority of at least 80% (0.8) for those URLs. And if you have enough comments on on those pages, the priority can even go up to 100% (1.0).
If you cannot live with these rules, edit the values $min_priority, $max_priority and $frontpage_priority in xml-sitemap-feed/feed-sitemap.php but be careful to NOT do an automatic upgrade or it will overwrite your customisation.
Do I need to submit the sitemap to search engines?
No. In normal circumstances, your site will be indexed by the major search engines before you know it. The search engines will be looking for a robots.txt file and (with this plugin activated) find a pointer in it to the XML Sitemap on your blog. The search engines will return on a regular basis to see if your site has updates.
( Read more about Ping-O-Matic under Does this plugin ping search engines (below) to make sure your site is under normal circumstances )
But if you have a server without rewrite rules, use your blog without fancy URLs (meaning, you have WordPress Permalinks set to the old Default value) or have it installed in a subdirectory, read Do I need to change my robots.txt for more instructions.
Does this plugin ping search engines?
No. While other XML Sitemap plugins provide pinging to some search engines upon each post edit or publication, this plugin does not. There are two reasons for that:
- WordPress has a built-in pinging feature. Go in your WP Admin section to Settings > Writing and make sure that the text area under Update services contains at least
http://rpc.pingomatic.com. Read more on Ping-O-Matic about what excellent service you are actually getting for free with every WordPress blog installation! - For the average website, in my experience, pinging Google or others after each little change does not benefit anything except a theoretical smaller delay in re-indexation of your website. This is only theoretical because if your site is popular and active, major search engines will likely be crawling your site on a very regular basis anyway. And if, on the other hand, your site is not high on the agenda of the major search engines, they will likely give no priority to your pings at all.
You can always take a Google Webmasters Tools account which will tell you many interesting things about your website, sitemap downloads, search terms and your visitors. Try it!
Do I need to change my robots.txt?
That depends. In normal circumstances, if you have no physical robots.txt file in your site root, the new sitemap url will be automatically added to the dynamic robots.txt that is generated by WordPress. But in some cases this might not be the case.
If you use a static robots.txt file in your website root, you will need to open it in a text editor. If there is already a line with Sitemap: http://yourblogurl.tld/sitemap.xml you can just leave it like it is. But if there is no sitemap referrence there, add it (adapted to your site url) to make search engines find your XML Sitemap.
Or if you have WP installed in a subdirectory, on a server without rewrite_rules or if you do not use fancy URLs in your Permalink structure settings. In these cases, WordPress will need a little help in getting ready for XML Sitemap indexing. Read on in the WordPress section for more.
My WordPress powered blog is installed in a subdirectory. Does that change anything?
That depends on where the index.php and .htaccess of your installation reside. If they are in the root while the rest of the WP files are installed in a subdir, so the site is accessible from your domain root, you do not have to do anything. It should work out of the box. But if the index.php is together with your wp-config.php and all other WP files in a subdir, meaning your blog is only accessible via that subdir, you need to manage your own robots.txt file in your domain root. It has to be in the root (!) and needs a line starting with Sitemap: followed by the full URL to the sitemap feed provided by XML Sitemap Feed plugin. Like:
Sitemap: http://yourblogurl.tld/subdir/sitemap.xmlIf you already have a robots.txt file with another Sitemap reference like it, just add the full line below or above it.
Do I need to use a fancy Permalink structure?
No. While I would advise you to use any one of the nicer Permalink structures for better indexing, you might not be able to (or don’t want to) do that. If so, you can still use this plugin:
Check to see if the URL yourblogurl.tld/?feed=sitemap does produce a feed. Now manually upload your own robots.txt file to your website root containing:
Sitemap: http://yourblogurl.tld/?feed=sitemap
User-agent: *
Allow: /You can also choose to notify major search engines of your new XML sitemap manually. Start with getting a Google Webmasters Tools account and submit your sitemap for the first time from there to enable tracking of sitemap downloads by Google! or head over to XML-Sitemaps.com and enter your sites sitemap URL.
Can I change the sitemap name/URL?
No. If you have fancy URL’s turned ON in WordPress (Permalinks), the sitemap url that you manually submit to Google (if you are impatient) should be yourblogurl.tld/sitemap.xml but if you have the Permalinks’ Default option set the feed is only available via yourblogurl.tld/?feed=sitemap.
Where can I customize the xml output?
You may edit the XML output in xml-sitemap-feed/feed-sitemap.php but be careful not to break Sitemap protocol compliance. Read more on Sitemaps XML format.
The stylesheet (to make the sitemap human readable) can be edited in xml-sitemap-feed/sitemap.xsl.php.
I see no sitemap.xml file in my site root!
The sitemap is dynamically generated just like a feed. There is no actual file created.
I see a sitemap.xml file in site root but it does not seem to get updated!
You are most likely looking at a sitemap.xml file that has been created by another XML Sitemap plugin before you started using this plugin. Just remove it and let the plugin dynamically generate it just like a feed. There is no actual file created.
If that’s not the case, you are probably using a caching plugin or your browser does not update to the latest feed output. Please verify.
I use a caching plugin but the sitemap is not cached
Some caching plugins have the option to switch on/off caching of feeds. Make sure it is turned on.
Frederick Townes, developer of W3 Total Cache, says: “There’s a checkbox option on the page cache settings tab to cache feeds. They will expire according to the expires field value on the browser cache setting for HTML.”
I get an ERROR when opening the sitemap or robots.txt!
The following errors might be encountered:
404 page instead of my sitemap.xml
Try to refresh the Permalink structure in WordPress. Go to Settings > Permalinks and re-save them. Then reload the XML Sitemap in your browser with a clean browser cache. ( Try Ctrl+R to bypass the browser cache — this works on most but not all browsers. )
404 page instead of both sitemap.xml and robots.txt
There are plugins like Event Calendar (at least v.3.2.beta2) known to mess with rewrite rules, causing problems with WordPress internal feeds and robots.txt generation and thus conflict with the XML Sitemap Feed plugin. Deactivate all plugins and see if you get a basic robots.txt file showing:
User-agent: *
Disallow:Reactivate your plugins one by one to find out which one is causing the problem. Then report the bug to the plugin developer.
404 page instead of robots.txt while sitemap.xml works fine
There is a know issue with WordPress (at least up to 2.8) not generating a robots.txt when there are no posts with published status. If you use WordPress as a CMS with only pages, this will affect you.
To get around this, you might either at least write one post and give it Private status or alternatively create your own robots.txt file containing:
Sitemap: http://yourblogurl.tld/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Allow: /and upload it to your web root…
** Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred **
On some setups (usually using the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin) this error occurs. The problem is known, the cause is not… Until I find out why this is happening, please take comfort in knowing that this only affects reading the sitemap in normal browsers but will NOT affect any spidering/indexing on your site. The sitemap is still readable by all search engines!
Can I run this on a WPMU / WP3+ Multi-Site setup?
Yes. In fact, it has been designed for it. Tested on WPMU 2.9.2 and WPMS 3.0.1 both with normal activation and with Network Activate / Site Wide Activate.
Can I run this plugin from /mu-plugins/ on WP3.0 MS or WPMU ?
Yes. Upload the complete /xml-sitemap-feed/ directory to /wp-content/mu-plugins/ and move the file xml-sitemap.php one dir up.
Changelog
Really? Ok then… Read the full XML & Google News Sitemap Feeds changelog 
Download
Latest version: Download XML & Google News Sitemap Feeds 3.9.1 [zip]
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250 Comments
Can you help me to test if my website’s sitemap.xml is OK ?
Through the Chrome’s “View source” , I can see the all links of my website ,but when I click the sitemap ,I can’t see anything in chrome and IE 6 、firefox…Does the plugin work well ??? Please help me ? Thanks a lot …….
Hi, the source of your sitemap is OK… it is just the sitemap stylesheet URL that is broken. It looks like you are on a Windows server, correct? I’ll investigate how to get the stylesheet URL working on a Windows server and then contact you for some testing, if that is all right with you.
Meanwhile, you do not need to worry: your sitemap is OK because the stylesheet is only for human eyes. Search engine spiders will ignore the stylesheet and index the sitemap just fine. To make sure for yourself, get a Webmaster Tools account at Google and add your site + sitemap URL there to get some good info about your website performance
Thanks a lot .I use the Godaddy’s free windows hosting .If I can help you ，I’d love to.How can I help you to test ??? sorry for my poor English…:(
Ah… ok, that explains a lot
Godaddy Windows hosting has posed a LOT of troubles for anyone wanting to run WordPress in the past. I hear it is possible these days but this issue might still be a residual effect.
Did you install WP via the Godaddy Applications admin interface (automated install) or did you upload via FTP?
Is there any particular reason to choose a Windows account? If not, you might consider switching to Linux hosting because that really is a better choice when you want full WordPress support…
Anyway, since you might be convicted to keep using Windows, can you please try the following for me? Open the file xml-sitemap-feed/feed-sitemap.php for editing and replace line 11 that says
echo '< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="'.get_bloginfo('charset').'"?>< ?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="'.get_option('siteurl').'/'.str_replace(ABSPATH,"", XMLSF_PLUGIN_DIR).'/sitemap.xsl.php?v='.XMLSF_VERSION.'"?>with
echo '< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="'.get_bloginfo('charset').'"?>< ?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="'.plugins_url('',__FILE__).'/sitemap.xsl.php?v='.XMLSF_VERSION.'"?>Please let me know the result
Hi,
I installed the plugin but it’s not showing up in the settings within WP admin area.
This is a site installed in a subdir.
I’ve been able to use it on other wp sites under the main domain.
Thank you in advance.
There never are settings in the admin area…
No configuration to be done. Your http://domain.tld/dir/sitemap.xml (or /?feed=sitemap without fancy permalinks) should be working fine. However, when installed in a subdir, WordPress will not generate any robots.txt output because robots.txt ALWAYS needs to be in the root.
Thank you for your help
Hi, I’ve a question
How it’s possible to have only one sitemap generated?
I wish only one and not all
Thank you
You have more than one sitemap? Are you using qTranslate maybe? In that case, you need a sitemap for each language because else the language tag will not be correct for one part of the links… Or are you referring to the Google News (sitemap-news.xml) feed? You cannot switch that off. It will not hurt your site in any way and will only be visited by Google News AFTER you have submitted your site to their News service and it has been accepted. Not doing that will result in the news sitemap being ignored. There really is no harm
I think I’m having the same issue as Paul. I’m also on a Windows server and your fix for Taglete worked great, but the plugin seems to be creating separate sitemaps for each subsite of my WordPress install instead of one master sitemap. For example http://www.rappahannock.edu/sitemap.xml is the root install sitemap and http://www.rappahannock.edu/academics/sitemap.xml is a subsite sitemap.
Hi Michael, so “academics” is a subdir site on your “rappahannock.edu” network but you are actually using that site as if it is part of the main site, not as separate sites? Interesting use of WP Multi-Site…
I am afraid my plugin regards all sites in a network as separate sites by design. Subdir sites just the same as subdomain sites. Changing that would mean a complete rewrite of the plugin.
The only thing I can do is take a look at how to get all the subsite sitemaps referenced in the root robots.txt to make the plugin fully subdir-multi-site compatible. Google and others do not have a problem with multiple sitemaps for one domain as long as they know where to find them and they are valid… It will not influence indexing or ranking of pages negatively. Would that work for you?
I do not have time to work on it this month, though. So in the mean time, I would advise you to put each sitemap (not just the main one) in your static robots.txt file in your site root. Just append them, each beginning with “Sitemap:” on a new line, below the main sitemap and all will be well
I use the windows hosting becsuse there is not ads in my blog.
I replace the codes you said. then I got the following errors when I open the website:www.taglete.info/sitemap.xml,also the
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 1 at column 2: StartTag: invalid element name
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
Ah… when posting code, the WordPress commenting system sneaks in spaces between each tag opening ‘< ‘ and ‘?’
That should be without spaces. So if you keep the same code but remove the spaces from between each ‘< ?’ (two times!) then it should be OK.
Hi, I have the same problem, in which file i need to remove spaces? Thanks
Steven, that error was due to a faulty edit. Are you saying you get the same error on a clean install? Can you give me a link?
Thanks a lot ….Problem solved.
Hi there,
Thanks for this awesome plugin. I’m new to WP, and I tried adding the robots.txt file to my sub dir where WP is installed, but when I go to http://www.bootcampvlog.com/sitemap.xmp I’m getting a 404 page.
I’m really not sure what I’m doing wrong. I installed the plugin, but I don’t think it’s working.
It looks like you are using Arne Brachhold’s Google Sitemap Generator… I cannot help you with that one.
Ravan,
With repsect to the style sheet error that another commenter posted, I experienced the same issue. But, as you noted the style sheet is really for my eyes, not the indexer’s.
I tested out my sitemap that was created with your plug-in using Google WebMaster and all is fine. Thanks for the plug-in!
Hi Andrew, also in Windows hosting I presume? The problem will be solved if you replace line 11 of feed-sitemap.php with this code
echo '< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="'.get_bloginfo('charset').'"?>< ?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="'.plugins_url('',__FILE__).'/sitemap.xsl.php?v='.XMLSF_VERSION.'"?>
(remove the spaces between < and ?)
But you are right, it's eye candy only
Hi,
So, I finally got around to activating the plugin on my website http://onlygizmos.com. It does find all the posts in the main site but I am running a multisite setup and the plugin doesn’t seem to pick up the posts from network sites e.g. this post was published today http://onlygizmos.com/windowsphone/rovio-says-angry-birds-for-wp7-in-some-months/2011/01/ but it doesn’t show up in the sitemap. Whereas other posts before and after this one do show up.
Hi, the XML Sitemap Feed plugin will not include posts/pages from one site in the sitemap of another site in your network. The plugin creates one sitemap.xml for each site in your network and each sitemap will only include links to posts and pages of ITS own site… Even if you are using Multi-site in sudbir mode, this will not change.
So your main site has its sitemap on /sitemap.xml and your subsite “windowsphone” should have a sitemap on windowsphone/sitemap.xml … unless you have some FeedBurner redirect running for ALL feeds
Thanks for clearing it up, RavanH.
You’re welcome.
A tip: The current version does not support inclusion of all sub-sites in the main robots.txt when in subdir mode. Support for it is planned for a future release but meanwhile, you might want to create/manage your own robots.txt file in your network root and put references ( Sitemap: http://…(full URL)… ) in it to each one, so search engines will automatically find them all
Thanks for the tip. Implemented it.
Dear,
RavanH firstly I would like to thank you for producing such a great plugin and making it available to us all.
I have an issue with the <a href="http://freeonlinebingocash.co.uk/sitemap-news.xml"
Firstly it’s not viewable in chrome or I.E. but is in firefox but says it has no stylesheet, which proably explains why it doesn’t display in the other browsers. I have just read a comment on your blog from the 28/12/2010 so I will try this in the first instance.
Secondly, more worryling, <a href="http://freeonlinebingocash.co.uk/sitemap-news.xml" in Google Webmaster says:
line 6
Missing XML tag
This required tag is missing. Please add it and resubmit.
Parent tag: urlset
Tag: url
Problem detected on: Jan 12, 2011
We haven’t made a blog post since the 9th Jan so maybe this is why?
Hi Dean, the fact that you do not have any posts younger than 2 days is indeed the cause of the ‘error’. I have not found any protocol for when there are no recent posts like that: no sitemap-news.xml at all (returning a 404 error) or a sitemap-news.xml without any URLs (returning a missing tag error) … I chose the last one.
Your Google News sitemap should be fine as soon as you make a new post, but then after two days it will show that error in the Webmaster Tools validation again. There is no real problem or harm in that. But if you get any complaints from the official Google News service, please let me know.
Hi RavanH,
I am having this same issue, but I have posted two new posts today and I still get this same error in Webmaster Tools after re-submitting the sitemap:
Missing XML tag
This required tag is missing. Please add it and resubmit.
To view it, my sitemap is here:
http://www.allpetnews.com/sitemap-news.xml
How else can I correct this?
Thanks!
Hi ravanH,
By adding your other code recommendation it seemed to fix it:
echo ‘< ?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="'.plugins_url('',__FILE__).'/sitemap.xsl.php?v='.XMLSF_VERSION.'"
Thanks!
Hi Marcus, I think you are confusing two things here.
Firstly, the edit you did to the xml sitemap template has made your sitemap on http://www.allpetnews.com/sitemap.xml invalid. Remove all the white spaces between each < and ? in that line you edited to make it valid again.
Secondly, the edit did not affect your News Sitemap on /sitemap-news.xml which uses a different template file. Anyway, to me looks all right. Keep in mind you are using a caching plugin that might be causing a delay in any new posts appearing in your xml and news sitemaps.
Thank you for the swift response, we are going to start blogging tommorrow so all should be well.
Many thanks!
The publication name is showing up as OnlyGizmos but we’d like to have it as OnlyGizmos (blog). Is there any setting available to do it?
What do you mean by “publication name”? And where is that showing up?
Hi,
The publication name is the name by which the blog was submitted for google sitemaps. We had submitted it as OnlyGizmos (blog) but the plugin(obviously) picks up OnlyGizmos from the site title.
Can you add an option in the backend where people can make changes to their publication name from the backend?
Well, I could but since this plugin does not have any options at all, I would be creating a whole backend thing for just that one option… I’m not going to do that for the public version but if you’d like to buy some of my time for a custom version, please contact me
Ok. Let’s me contact you by e-mail to discuss further on this.
Hallo Allard,
It’s probably a huge question to ask, but would there be any chance images will be added to the sitemap someday?
Btw. like the new look
Best regards,
Cor
Ha Cor,
What kind of images where you thinking of? I can add images to the stylesheet but not to the sitemap itself. The protocol does not allow images. But it does allow links to images. Do you mean that? You want the attached images to be referenced in the sitemap as well as regular post/pages?
It can be done but I read it is unnecessary because Google will index the images along with the post content (using the image alt – and link title tags) … Or do you have images that you do not show in your posts but you do want them in the sitemap?
Allard
Hallo Allard,
Sorry for the late reply. I was referring to an image sitemap (like ie. Yoast’s includes)
As there was talk about including video to a sitemap is a good thing for SEO, I didn’t know it was already handled by using image alt and title tags for images.
Well, if Joost says so, it must have some validity (no irony here) … I’ll have a look into the subject and consider implementation.
Hi. I’ve just installed your plugin. It seems to work fine. But I have one question: In the http://www.homelivecinema.com/sitemap-news.xml file doesn’t appear all my posts (all my posts appears on http://www.homelivecinema.com/sitemap.xml). Does this means that google will never add those post to its search engine? Do I have to do something to put them on google?
Thanks
Hi Ciprian, your sitemap.xml is the XML Sitemap that search engines will be looking at for indexing your site. They should be able to find it themselves and you don’t have to do anything at all but if you like you can open a Google Webmaster Tools account and add your sitemap there. It will tell you how many of the URLs it has indexed and a lot more valuable info
The sitemap-news.xml is a dedicated News Sitemap and will only show posts from the last two days. This is (so far) only meant for Google News and your site will need to be accepted as a new provider to be included. Read more on http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/topic.py?topic=8909 or apply for inclusion on http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=191208&rd=1
Hi Ravan,
Could you check out http://droidism.net/sitemap-news.xml ?
It seems that sitemap isn’t working while sitemap.xml looks just fine.
It looks OK to me…
sitemap.xml is formatted correctly
sitemap-news.xml is just a paragraph that looks exactly like this:
http://droidism.net/android/pedal-harder-your-phone-is-depending-on-you/Droidismen2011-02-02T21:51:24+00:00Pedal harder, your phone is depending on you!android, nokia, phone chargerBloghttp://droidism.net/android/android-apps/android-market-webstore-live-um-almost/Droidismen2011-02-02T19:39:20+00:00Android Market Webstore LIVE! Um… Almostandroid, Apps, Market, WebstoreBloghttp://droidism.net/android/smart-phones/verizons-emergency-text/Droidismen2011-02-02T19:31:24+00:00Verizon’s Emergency Textemergency, fascinate, Samsung, VerizonBloghttp://droidism.net/android/smart-phones/t-mobile-good-vibrations-launching-vibrant-fastest-4g-phone-in-the-world/Droidismen2011-02-02T08:05:50+00:00T-Mobile good Vibrations. Launching Vibrant. Fastest 4G phone in the World!4G, Announcement, HSPA+, Release Date, Samsung, T-mobile, Vibrant 4GBloghttp://droidism.net/android/android-os/update-for-the-xperia/Droidismen2011-02-02T00:47:59+00:00Update For The XperiaFroYo, Moxier, sony ericsson, X10, X10 mini, XperiaBlog
Is that not what you are seeing?
That’s probly your browser doing that… Open the page source (in IE: right click > View source, I think) to see the real code as seen by Google News.
Hey Ravan,
When I use your plugin to generate a Sitemap feed for Google News, it gives me an error when submitted to Google Webmaster Tools: “URL not allowed. This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location.” The plugin is generating URLs like: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PopularFidelity/~3/MaOYASNgeho/
When I click on the above URL it displays fine, routing through Feedburner like my RSS feed normally does. Why is it not an acceptable sitemap for Google? Do I need to disable feedburner or set up a second clean RSS feed?
It looks like either your theme or a plugin is redirecting ALL feeds to your FeedBurner account. And since your XML and News Sitemaps are actually two new feeds, any requests for them get redirected to your main RSS feed via FeedBurner too. This completely voids the specific XML Sitemap markup and all other rules that both an XML Sitemap and a News Sitemap have to live by… If there is no way for you to disable this redirection for ALL feeds (for your RSS feeds it is fine, but not the two that are generated by my plugin) you will be better off switching to another XML Sitemap plugin.
Do you know what exactly is causing that FeedBurner redirection?
I think all the feeds are being redirected by Feedburner Feedsmith plugin. It redirects all feeds to Feedburner automatically, and I’m not sure how to change it to affect only the RSS feed. Is there another feedburner plugin I should try to use?
I’m not aware of any other plugin that does that. But there are many how-to’s on doing the same (but this time only for any request with /feed/ in it) without a plugin. Like this one: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-redirect-wordpress-default-rss-feeds-to-feedburner-without-any-plugin.html
Hope that helps
Hello – is there a way to excluded a particular category from the feed? I have some non-news items that I don’t want in the news sitemap.
Thank you!
Keith
The only way to do that currently is by editing the plugin file feed-sitemap-news.php … On line 26 there starts the posts query. Insert on line 27 a new line like
'cat' => array( -12, -3 ),to exclude all the categories you want to. Other query parameters can be found on http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/query_postsBut remember that this will be overwriten on the next plugin upgrade.
Our sitemap is empty and we have posts newer than a couple of days old
http://www.talkandroid.com/sitemap.xml
Any ideas what might be going on, or how we can debug this?
There seem to be two things going on there. Do you have some feed redirection going on so the sitemap-news.xml lands on FeedBurner. However, that does not seem to interfere with the sitemap.xml feed. Something else is breaking the feed before it can show any post links. I suspect it is the memory limit so I will send you an e-mail with an adapted version of feed-sitemap.php. If you’d be so kind to test it for me…
Hi there,
By default, it seems that you set the language to english, is this changeable ?
thanks,
Benjamin
Hi Benjamin, did you set your preferred language in your wp-config.php?
We are seeing errors in our log like this:
==============
PHP Notice: Undefined variable: wpdb in /wp-content/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/XMLSitemapFeed.class.php on line 9
==============
I’ve fixed by adding missing ‘global $wpdb;’ to function go() in class XMLSitemapFeed.
Otherwise, works great!
Yep, it’s already in the development version but as it throws only a Notice, I have not made a bugfix release for it… Thanks for reporting anyway and good to hear you are happy with the plugin
I am using your plugin in multi-site mode, right now I need to use robots.txt to control how Google index my site.
May I know How can I append my custom rules to the dynamically generated robots.txt?
Thank you.
The easiest is to create a static robots.txt file and copy the current rules into it along with the new ones… But that will probably not perform very well on a multi-site setup because it will show the same rules across all sites in your network.
If that’s a problem, you should probably use a plugin that controls the robots.txt content. I suppose there are some available out there but I cannot suggest any.
But you can hire me to write one from scratch for you if you need it. Then you are sure it will be compatible with XML Sitemap Feed
A quick note to thank you Raven. Just installed your plugin and it is working well. Your commitment to responding to all posts is impressive. Keep up the great work (:
Raven, for three days I have been trying to submit our site map to google and even though I can fetch the site map as googlebot and find no issues under diagnostics, I keep getting the google error message:
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines
This morning I installed your plugin and resubmitted only to find the the same issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
thank you
Site: http://www.ensmartsolutions.com
Hi Mathew, I see nothing wrong with your sitemap on http://www.ensmartsolutions.com/sitemap.xml … are you submitting that exact URL? With the www?
Ah… did not see your second comment before. Great
Thanks Ravan. The errors remain. There are two unusual things I notice.
1) If I try to change the preffered domain setting I get a messsage to verify my ownership eventhough this was already done and I have access to all webmaster functions on the site.
2) I have tried fetching the sitemap.xml as the googlebot multiple times. Out of 5 attempts 3 succeeded and 2 failed.
Have spent hours looking at the forums and it looks like there are many people with my issue and no solid solution.
The “preferred domain” setting is just an indication of your preference, of how the URLs are visible in Google Search results. Nothing more. The real problem is probably the URL you used when adding your site in the Webmaster Toosl account.
So, if you did not do this already, add your site with www in the URL and then:
1. Set the www as your preferred domain under Settings.
2. Check the robots.txt content under Crawler Access to see if the URLs match (also with www).
3. Go to the Sitemaps list and look at the tab ‘Others’ or ‘All’. The sitemap is probably already listed there. If not, submit it.
If it’s still showing an error, select it, hit “Resubmit” and come back later to see if it has been processed.
If you cannot add your site with www in the URL in the Webmaster Tools account (for whatever reason) consider switching to the NON www url in your WordPress settings and set the preferred domain to non www in the Webmaster Tools account.
It really does not matter, as long as it matches
Ravan,
Thanks again for your great care and response. I have tried the suggestions about the www version with no sucess. Will try the non www as well. Hope I can get this thing to work !
Mathew, http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html shows no errors for your sitemap so maybe Google just needs some time to adjust. You can also try to delete the sitemap you added in GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) and let it find the sitemap for itself — which it should be able to. In any case, give it some time before trying the new approach….
I’ve installed xml sitemap generator, but there is a blank line at the top of the feed that is messing up submission to google.
Any idea where the blank line at the top has come from or how to remove it?
Thanks
Hi Ethan, I do not see a blank line in the source of http://www.clinicalnutritioncenter.com/blog1/sitemap.xml … Are you sure Google isn’ t complaining about a previous sitemap version from the XML Sitemap Generator plugin you probably had installed before? (My plugin is called XML Sitemap Feed, you see
)
I get this error, accessing sitemap.url (after some delay). I have WP 3.1.1, WP Super Cache and about 1300 pages on the blog.
XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/?feed=sitemap
Line Number 7, Column 34566:
It appears that the sitemap generation quits after 162 pages and leaves unclosed tags.
Sounds like a PHP memory issue. Try the development version which tries to increase memory further than the current stable.
I tried the development version. I got:
<!-- memory-limit="90M" --><!-- memory-limit-increase: failed -->
Ok, so the attempt to increase the available memory from 90M to 256M failed and you still run into the memory limit. It sounds like your provider, Dreamhost (right?) is blocking the increase and on the dreamhost forums I see some posts like http://discussion.dreamhost.com/thread-47135.html about the subject. If it turns out to be impossible to increase the memory_limit value (either in a custom php.ini file or after recompiling PHP5 with new settings like is suggested in one answer) then I’m afraid I cannot help you. You site is simply too big for my plugin with that particular PHP memory limit.
Unless you want to switch hosts or hire me to code you a custom version of the plugin for it
I had problems with the Google XML Sitemap plug in, running out of memory too. I don’t quite understand why the sitemap problem takes so much memory. I think I will make something to run on my desktop that connects with the database remotely and then uploads the sitemap. That way I have giggle-bytes of memory to play with.
Thanks.
That’s because WP loads all posts and pages in one query. And although for the sitemap we only need the URL and some data like number of comments and last modified date to calculate priority, WP loads everything including content and irrelevant meta-data with that one query. So if your site holds vast amounts of posts and/or has on average a very large post content, the process will take a lot of memory.
Sadly, it’s hard to predict when it’s going to run into the provider imposed memory limit. Most providers allow you to adjust that limit from within PHP to temporarily increase it for memory intensive processes like file uploads (especially zipped files like plugins or WP core updates) and something like this sitemap generation. Apparently, Dreamhost does not
I am very confused using this sitemap. and constantly looking for ways to use it.
You are not using my plugin.
Hello Ravan,
Thanks for your plugin!
I have one problem. Sitemap works fine, but sitemap-news returns an error: http://pslnewsy.pl/sitemap-news.xml/
Google tells me that the urlset tag is missing in line 6.
The tag is there, I checked, so why it’s not seen?
Hi Sylwia, it might be that Google is looking at cached content and needs some time to get up-to-date… Or it might have trouble with that trailing slash that seems to appear on your install. Not sure why that is happening though… What Permalink rules have you set? Do you know why your post type “External Videos” seems to force a different permalink structure than normal pages?
If the problem (in the eyes of Google) persists for more than a few hours, you might try the development version: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/xml-sitemap-feed.zip
Thanks for your answer. For reasons unknown to me the sitemap was fine today and Google accepted it. Indeed, the trailing slash disapepared, although I don’t understand why.
Thanks anyway!
I installed XML Sitemap Feed plugin, but something strange happens. When you go to the sitemap URLs, they get redirected to the URLs but with a trailing slash at the end. This isn’t a problem with the English sitemaps, but with the Spanish ones, they redirect to the English files. Check it out:
http://www.artstroll.com/sitemap.xml
http://www.artstroll.com/es/sitemap.xml (redirects to English, with a trailing slash)
http://www.artstroll.com/sitemap-news.xml
http://www.artstroll.com/es/sitemap-news.xml (redirects to English)
Since the robots.txt file shows the URLs without a trailing slash, I’m afraid that Google (or other search engines) is not finding the Spanish sitemap.
Any ideas why this might be happening?
Thank you in advance for your help.
-Eduardo
Hi Eduardo, I’ve seen this trailing slash thing happen before… It has to do with the Permalink structure and maybe another plugin but I’m not clear on what actaully causes it. Something (like another plugin ot the theme you are using) is adding a trailing slash that causes WordPress to try and strip it out again, redirecting you to the root sitemap.xml in the process. And yes, search engines will get redirected too
I suggest the following steps (each time verifying if anything has changed) to debug:
1. Check your permalink structure and resave (!)
2. Temporarily switch to the default Twenty Ten theme
3. Switch off all other plugins
I have not been able to reproduce the issue so it would be great if you can find what actually causes this.
If the above steps do not get any results, put your site back to the original state (theme and plugins) and upgrade the XML Sitemap Feed plugin to the latest development version from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/xml-sitemap-feed.zip and then retrace the steps above…
I hope that is not too complicated for you and thanks for taking the trouble
Thank you for your help, Ravan.
I followed suggestions 1 and 2, and they didn’t fix the problem. I’m reluctant to try suggestion 3, but will do so if all else fails.
Another strange think is that it used to work fine on another website that I have: http://www.bahiadelmarrincon.com/
But now it doesn’t. I haven’t added any new plugins to that website, but I HAVE upgraded to a newer version of WordPress. I suspect that the trailing slash problem was introduced by WordPress (not by plugins). And it seems to happen only with XML — it doesn’t happen with other types of URLs, e.g.:
http://www.artstroll.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/ArtStroll2011_PotentialVenues.pdf
http://www.artstroll.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ArtStroll2011_Postcard.png
-Eduardo
The URLs you give as an example, are files not WordPress managed URLs… but anyway, it is strange. What WP version are you using? If it is the latest (3.1.3) than you might notice this site is using that version too without your particular issue.
I understand you hesitate to switch off plugins on a live site. Maybe you can skip that step and try the development version of XML Sitemap Feed
Up until the latest WP update everything was working fin but now Webmaster tools is showing a red cross against /sitemap.xml and /sitemap.xml.gz
I’ve turned off all the plugins and even done a fresh install and nothing works. Is there a conflict with the latest WP update?
Hi john, I’m looking at your sitemap on http://photo-journ.com/sitemap.xml and it’s Google Sitemap Generator by Arne Brachhold that is responsible for that sitemap… Not my plugin so I can’t help you with that one, sorry.
Well, actually I could but you will be better off asking the plugin developers support first. Or switch to mine, ofcourse
Sorry about that. I took your off and tried the other to see if it would make a difference and forgot to change back before posting the support request.
I went back and deleted the other plugin and manually deleted the sitemap.xml files using FTP and also edited the Robots text file.
I reinstalled yours but it hasn’t generated a new sitemap. Could this have something to do with Feedburner?
In any event I disabled the feedburner email widget and Feedsmith extended plugins and did a fresh install of yours and still no sitemap.
I DO see a sitemap on http://photo-journ.com/sitemap.xml (this time indeed generated by my plugin) and as far as I can tell, there is nothing wrong with it… Re-submit it to Google Webmaster Tools and let it chew on it for a while.
About /sitemap.xml.gz – there is no such version so if you submitted that to Google Webmaster Tools, it will be marked as broken (404).
About /robots.txt – it will be best to leave it up to WordPress to generate the robots.txt output instead of having your own robots.txt file in your site root. My advice would be to delete the file you have there.
About FeedBurner – it depends on what plugin (or theme) you are using to redirect feed requests to FeedBurner. Some redirect ALL feed requests and that will then include requests for the sitemap (since that is actually a feed with my plugin) but others will only redirect RSS/Atom feed requests and will leave the sitemap alone. I have used FD FeedBurner plugin successfully in combination with XML Sitemap Feed so I can recommend that one…
Feedsmith, I don’t know. I’ll be happy to take a look if/when you activate that plugin
Sorry about that. he message posted while I was still tinkering. Webmaster Tools is now showing it is receiving the feed but http://photo-journ.com/sitemap.xml doesn’t display anything, in Firefox asking if I want to subscribe.
Have you tried clearing your browser cache?
All is good now. The problem was Feedsmith. Excellent plugin. Just drop it in and forget about it.
Sitemaps seem to work for me but the news one does not? Any ideas?
http://mikemcquaid.com/sitemap-news.xml
http://mikemcquaid.com/sitemap.xml
Well… you need news (a post) less than 48 hours old to appear in the Google News Sitemap
Hey there, great, great plugin btw. How can I list categories? is there a hack or something? Ty!
sorry, this plugin does not do that… pages and posts but no archives. the only exception being the front page.
Hi
I host a few WordPress sites on Windows Server 2003/IIS 6.0, and I’m having trouble getting your sitemap plugin to work.
I’m using XML Sitemap Feed Version 3.9.1, I’m running WordPress 3.1.3, I’ve got Permalinks set to /%postname% using a 404 handler (details available if required), and I’m using a plugin called Legacy URL Forwarding as well.
Oh, and I made the modification to line 11 of feed-sitemap.php.
I can see /robots.txt, which say this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
But there’s no sitemap.xml.
Any idea what’s happening?
Thanks,
Paul
Hi Paul, using a permalink like simply %POSTNAME% sounds to me like asking for trouble. A conflict between a post and a page with the same slug is easily encountered… Anyway, the fact that the sitemap is not mentioned in robots.txt (as long as it’s not a static file you’re looking at) indicates the plugin is not active. Did you get an error on plugin activation? Do you see anything related in your server error logs?
Another option: try the development version http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/xml-sitemap-feed.zip
Hi,
I installed the plugin and activated it. Is that all I need to do?
I tried to check out the sitemap, but I get a 404 error.
Is this the right way to check the sitemap?
http://www.insurancesolutionstexas.com.tld/sitemap.xml
It is not working?
I appreciate your help.
Thank you!
Hi Glenn, for most WordPress installs that’s basically it, yes… But in your case, you need to do one thing more: start using ‘Pretty URLs’ by activating any one of the other Permalink options than the one you are using now. It will be good for your SEO (keywords in the urls are cosidered with priority search engines) and your /robots.txt /sitemap.xml and even /sitemap-news.xml will come live instantly
How can I know whether everything is setup correctly for my website to be recognised?
I don’t see a way I can view my sitemap (so that I have the peace of mind there is one) and I don’t see a robots.txt in my root
As far as I know, this plugin is doing nothing formy site.
Hi Charlie, if your site is not generating a robots.txt, it will not generate a sitemap.xml… To get a dynamic robots.txt you will need to (1) use any of the fancy Permalink structures and (2) remove any static robots.txt from your site root.
If my plugin is working correctly it will ALWAYS generate a sitemap feed via /index.php?feed=sitemap whetever Permalink structure you are using. If you do not get a feed via that URL, the plugin is not functioning.
Are we talking about backin5mins.com? Because you are running another xml sitemap plugin there…
thanks RavanH,
I think it was the “/index.php?feed=sitemap” that I needed to see.
It appears to be working, but there is still no robots.txt in my websites directory or the root of my hosting account.
Charlie, the robots.txt is not a file. It’s generated by WordPress and my plugin hooks into that to publish the sitemap location. Everything seems to be working in order, see http://hkeventresources.com/robots.txt … Can I assume BuddyPress compatibility then?
Hi there!
I’m using your plugin and it seems to be almost perfect
My only issue is that when there is no article in the feed, google thinks there is an error with it, saying the format is not correct, and therefore seems to stop fetching it regularly or visits it less frequently which is problematic when adding fresh content after that.
Could you have a look ?
Thanks a lot !
Hi Benjamin,
I suppose you are talking about the News Sitemap? It lists only posts less than 48 hours old as this is what Google News wants. So yes, when there are NO posts, it lists no URLs.
Google webmaster Tools reports this as an error (based on general xml sitemap rules) but it is unclear to me and many others, since the question remains unanswered by any Google staff, if this actually a problem for the Google News crawler. And if it IS a problem, what should be the alternative… So when designing my plugin, I chose to let it present a news sitemap without any URLs.
It seems many people get worried about the error reported by Google Webmaster Tools. So I might choose for an alternative approach in the upcoming plugin release of presenting at least the latest post URL when there are no posts less then two days old.
Do you have proof (or any indication) that the Google News crawler (not the one from Google Webmaster Tools!) stops coming back after finding an empty news sitemap? If so, I really need to find out what Google News wants as responce when there is NO news…
Thanks for the quick answer!
Yes talking about the News Sitemap
I have no proof but what I usually see is that when the sitemap has been recognized by Google as faulty, it takes more time to get a new post published on Google News then.
The Error displayed on Google Webmaster tool just in case:
“Missing XML tag
This required tag is missing. Please add it and resubmit.”
What I usually do is submit the sitemap again so that my articles are published, though it’s still longer than when I still have content in the feed.
Hope it helps
I’ve just committed a change to the news sitemap template in the new development version which should make it default to at least one (the latest) post when there are no posts less than 48 hours old. I would really appreciate it if you could test it to see if this changes this delay in indexing after a ‘stale’ news sitemap…
You can download it from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/xml-sitemap-feed.zip
Thanks
Hi Ravan,
Maybe we could communicate by mail could be simpler
So I had no articles in my feed and just published one, added a Google news search feed (with site:iostv.fr) on Google Reader to try to have an estimate of the time needed for google to add the article compared to when it has been published in the sitemap, once it’s published I’ll install the other version of your plugin and will test (hopefully this weekend if no hot news comes along).
Cheers,
Benj
So with the current public version of the plugin, feed empty > posted an article : it took 4 hours and 33 minutes to appear on Google News.
Benjamin, thanks for reporting back. I wrote you an e-mail so please check your spam folder if you would like to communicate further via mail
Can you please improve your addon to work with gtranslate pro plugin?
http://edo.webmaster.am/gtranslate
If user bought pro version, it creates links like site.com/es/?p=73, site.com/ru/?p=73 – around 55 languages.
Please write me directly – I will provide any information you need and will give you gtranslate pro author contact information.
Thank you for your work so much!
Hi Dmitry, thanks for your heads-up. When I get some time to, I’ll take a look at the gtranslate plugin. I suppose the free version is not so different from the pro version but if I need more info, I’ll contact you via e-mail. The main question will be: what does Google do with pages that it has basically just translated itself. Will it see them as duplicates or will the search engine spider be fooled by the translator bot output as being real content? It will be an interesting experiment
Free version makes it translated with jquery and not available to search engine bot. Pro version gives ability to translate and cache pages for search engine bot to read them like originally writen article. For that in free version you must enable “redirect” and “use pro version”, then set up your apache/nginx to redirect /es/ /en/ /ru/ or so to granslate php file – it will give translated page as output.
Hi,
great plugin!
Is it posible to brake sitemap into few pages dynamically?
Not the sitemap.xml for SE … but page for visitors and SE … because it has more than 100 links in one page?
Hi, the sitemap is only for SE. The page visible for visitors on the same location is generated with a stylesheet which is ignored by the SE spiders. But breaking up the list of links will be noticed by the spiders. It can be done via a sitemap index file referencing multiple sitemaps each containing part of the sites page urls but there really is no need for it if your site has less than 50.000 post and pages…. There are better plugins around that are specially designed for creating a nice site map page for human eyes that allow you to group URLs any way you like
Thanks for your great Work. I change the Plugins an the SUMA’s bring more Traffic to my Blog. This Article is for you http://blogger-world.de/?p=2787
Thanks
Thomas
Thanks, Thomas
Hey RavanH,
one question please. My Blog aren’t in the Google News. is this a problem that they look every post for the sitemap-news? The WT said you are not in the News with this blog and crossed the sitemap.
Hi Thomas, do I understand you correctly in saying that you had submitted your Google News Sitemap (sitemap-news.xml) in your Google Webmaster Tools account but it has been removed again with the remark that your site is not registered or accepted by Google News? I have not seen that before… What does GWT say about your regular sitemap.xml? If there is no error there, all should be fine with your site.
Are we talking about your site blogger-world.de? If so, you are not using my sitemap plugin there.
Hey RavanH,
i use it but i was spammed in last 30 minutes hard. so i restore the wrong folder. Look right now i use it.
just you Look i must restore an file
My blog isn’t welcome in the Google News. So there is an red cross and the message i write. The normal sitemap is fine. Only my old plugin do an .gz and that must delete from the GWT.
I don’t understand that G search for the google-news sitemap on my root because i don’t accept in GN.
I suspect it is because there is a reference in http://blogger-world.de/robots.txt to it. This is not a problem.
The fact that your site is not listed by Google News does not mean you are prohibited from having a news sitemap
but it looks like Webmaster Tools is kind enough to report what Google does with the news sitemap. It will be ignored until your site is accepted. This is not a problem because you will still make your latest posts (along with all the others) known to Google via the normal sitemap where they will appear at the top (right after the home URL) as soon as you post.
You can manually remove the sitemap-news.xml from the list of sitemaps in GWT if you are tired of that red cross…
Thanks for spend the time on my question.
Red is for me an Warning Color but you say thats no problem and than its no problem for me
I can’t remove the news Sitemap on the GWT there don’t stand in my sites only in all. There no delete function. So i wait or Google can do what they want.
Greatings
Thomas
Hey there, I don’t see the Settings-Page, and the sitemap.xml isn’t updated since 23th of this month… so two articles aren’t in the sitemap, are there any issues with other plugins?
Hi Oliver, there is no settings page. It’s completely automatic and functional.
Looking at the sitemap on http://www.allesit.de/sitemap.xml I see all the latest posts there, corresponding to those in the main feed. The latest modification to an older post done on 2011-09-28 13:18 is depicted there too. Maybe you are looking at an older version of the sitemap in your browser cache? Reload the sitemap with Ctrl+R or clear the browser cache.
The only thing wrong I notice is the sitemap reference in the (manually maintained, I presume) robots.txt. It points to a non existent sitemap on another domain… Either adapt the URL or just delete the robots.txt file and let WordPress handle it for you.
Hi RavanH,
Great plugin and I use it on a number of Linux hosted sites, no problem.
But, I’ve just installed it on a Windows hosted site and there is a problem with the path on XSL.: http://www.pestco.co.uk/sitemap.xml
Any ideas?
Also, do you have line feeds after each end tag?
Cheers
Paul
Hi Paul, could you install the development version http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/xml-sitemap-feed.zip on your windows hosted site? There is a slight difference in URL generation which might just fix it for you. Please let me know the result
Oh, and no, there are no linefeeds after each closing url tag. Are you saying there should be? As far as I know, this is only obligatory for Text file format sitemaps…
Hi RavanH,
That new version worked a treat, it looks excellent now.
MANY THANKS!!!
The line feeds would just make it easier to scan through the file in text mode. But, your plugin is great as it is.
Thanks again,
Paul
That’s good news. Thanks for testing
About the lack of linefeeds: that is done to keep the sitemap on VERY large sites just a little bit smaller. It’s not much but still… But you can edit the feed template yourself to include linefeeds between the tags if you like. It’s not so difficult. Open XML Sitemap Feed in the WordPress plugin editor, go to the file feed-sitemap.php and find near the end (line 139) the starting tag
<url>and put a linebreak (no code, just an Enter) right in front of it. You can do the same for the other tags<lastmod>,<changefreq>and<priority>too and put five spaces in front to increase readability even further.Hello, I installed wordpress 3.3.1 in a subdomain and sitemap generation is not done.
So I installed the development version given in the previous post and it works.
The first link of the articles at a rate of 70% and the links below 0.
This will be a problem for SEO.
http://dev.iml-imprimerie.com/sitemap.xml
Salut Christophe,
First thing to realize is that 0% in sitemap priority does not mean that URL has no value. Priority is relative. So on a site with only two pages, one with 100% and the other with 0% is in the eyes of Google the same as one with 60% and one with 40% priority. It just means one is more important than the other. Not that one is all important while the other is worthless. Besides, Google does not take these values very seriously. Visitor behaviour and internal page linking much more so, which could result in the page of lesser importance (according to the site owner) being deemed of higher importance by Google all mighty.
Secondly, the automatic priority calculation in my plugin takes various factors into account: difference between oldest and latest post modified date, each posts last modified date, page hierarchy, number of posts versus number of pages (emphasis on site or blog?) and number of comments (per post/page relative to total) plus last comment date. These factors combined are used to determine the relative importance of each URL. Except the home URL which is always 100%, the newest post starts with either 70% (if it’s a blog with more posts than pages) or 40% (if it’s a site with more pages than posts) and can rise to 100% depending on comment activity, the URL of the oldest post usually drops toward 0% unless it has very high comment count and recent comment activity. Pages can start with either 30% (when it is a blog) or 80% (when it’s a site), their hierarchy and finally, like posts, comment count and activity.
This rather complex calculation works best when there are many posts and/or pages, when there is a large time difference between the oldest and youngest posts and when there comments on at least some posts or pages.
Now on your site, there are relatively little pages and posts, little time between the first and latest post and no comments. This will always result in large differences between high and low priority values. The plugin thinks it’s a blog since you have three posts versus two pages. The youngest post (based on modification date, not creation date!) starts with 70% while the oldest posts (same age) drop to 0% since there is no comment activity. The front page always gets 100% while the only other page gets 30% based on that same estimation that it’s a blog.
I would advice to put the info that you are presenting currently as posts, on pages instead. Posts are meant for and treated (not only by my plugin) as time-related, loosing relevance as time passes unless visitor activity (like comments or visitor count) says otherwise. Pages are meant for information that is time unrelated, not loosing it’s value as time goes by. This would also change all of their URL priorities to the same value of 70 or 80% depending on hierarchy
In the next release of this plugin, I plan on adding a means to set these priority values per page/post to override the automatic calculation. But I cannot promise any release date…
we can drop the column of rates in the creation of the sitemap ?
No, you cannot. But do not worry about those rates too much. Google and others might take them as an indication but usually draw their own conclusion on other info like incoming links, traffic, search terms and other mysterious factors
Hi there, we just installed this on http://www.digitalbookworld.com. The /sitemap.xml file is from a previous plugin we were using (currently awaiting my Development team removing that file). The /sitemap-news.xml file populates correctly. My question is, is there a way to pull content into this News Sitemap only for a single category? Our Digital Book Wire category (http://www.digitalbookworld.com/category/wire) is our “news” category…and Google News only wants “newsworthy” content (not how-to/evergreen content). So, we’d like only that category to populate in the /sitemap-news.xml file. Is this possible? If not, what’s your reasoning to not have this functionality? Thanks!
Hi Kern,
It is currently not possible. The reasoning is (was) simplicity. But I realise as popularity increases, the need for at least some flexibility increases too. Some kind of control, allowing exclusion of certain posts of categories plus differentiating in Genre tag value is on the roadmap for the next release… But as said to Christophe just moments ago, I cannot give an estimate on when it will be ready.
In the mean time, you could simply edit the file feed-sitemap-news.php… Find on line 26 the start of
query_posts(...and add a new line below it that says:'category_name' => 'wire',
Hi, I woke up today being advised about some pages in my website that had an error problem. After testing all the plugins within my site I noticed that the plugin that caused my pages to create this error was the the XML SiteMap Feed plugin. After deactivating it, all my pages came back to normal. Everything was good yesterday, but I guess once I updated to the latest version, that’s when the errors occurred. Any thoughts on this, or a way to fix it? Thanks in advance!
Hi Lenin,
Can you tell me more on what the error was en when it occurred exactly?
The error made all my item pages display this message below:
Error 404 – Page not found!
You are here: Home → 404 Not Found
The page you trying to reach does not exist, or has been moved. Please use the menus or the search box to find what you are looking for.
The error only occurred after updating your plugin to the latest version. It is disabled right now and all my pages are working fine again. Is there something I can do to make it work properly again?
Although I would not recommend reactivating the plugin on a live site, it would really be helpful if you could find a related PHP error in the server (or hosting) error log. Without some hints from there, I have no clue what could be going on at this point because I cannot reproduce the issue. Are you running a lot of other plugins on the same site?
I checked the files in my server and did not find an error log file. I kept the plugin deactivated. I received an email with a solution I have not tried yet. They told me to install this plugin instead (XML & Google News Sitemap Feeds). I will keep you guys posted if this works. Also, to answer your question, yes, I do have multiple plugins installed in my site. About 10 of them. Thanks for helping me with this.
How do I include custom post types into the Google News Sitemap?
I’ve read people managing to do it but can’t find a piece of code anywhere!
Thanks
Hi Ben, you’ll need to download the latest development version from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/xml-sitemap-feed.zip (unzip and upload via FTP). Then open your wp-config.php and add a new line to define all post types you want represented in the news sitemap:
define('XMLSF_NEWS_POST_TYPE', 'post,my-custom-type-name');