What’s the Best WordPress XML Sitemap Plugin?

Have you been looking for the best XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress? I have been using the plugin by Arne Brachhold called Google XML Sitemaps for quite some time and been extremely happy with both its flexibility and active development. He has done a great job with the plugin.

This plugin does a great job because of all the options it provides. Here are a few features I really love about this plugin:

  • Post Priority (this is especially useful, even more so if you have Popularity Contest enabled)
  • Auto-detects the sitemap location
  • Options to include or exclude specific content types (example, posts, categories, archives, tag pages, etc)
  • Easy to change the frequency for robots to re-crawl pages (example, Daily, Monthly, Yearly, etc)
  • Easy to change the priority level for each content type

Here’s a screenshot of what the primary options will look like.

WordPress XML Sitemap Plugin

Download link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/google-sitemap-generator.zip

Get involved, Vibe with us.

20 Vibes for this post.

  1. Ted Goas says:

    Admittedly I read through this quickly, but I didn’t see the name or link of the plugin you’re referring to above. I’d love to find a great XML sitemap generator and not rely as much on creating them manually!

    • Dre Armeda says:

      Ted, the plugin is Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold. Thanks for pointing out the missing download link, it has been added. This plugin truly does make keeping a current XML sitemap easy.

  2. Heiko says:

    I agree this is the best sitemap generator. It also works pretty good for SEO.

  3. quick tips says:

    yup i agree with this google xml sitemap generator is the best one

  4. Vlad says:

    Hi,
    I created my xml sitemap. Everything is ok: http://personalinjuryfirmstoronto.com/sitemap.xml

    Do i need to have a link in my Menu to the sitemap. Or it should be hidden. Whats the best for SEO?

  5. Jamie says:

    HI,

    I am using this plug in. Do you know if there is a way to get the plug in to list your site in the file both with and without the www. Google webmaster tool reports an error if the site is not listed both ways.

    • Jamie, it’s really a bad idea to have both www and non-www, you should only be using one — in fact, WordPress will only let you have one. So your question isn’t very relevant as Google only wants to see one. Google treats sub-domains differently than normal domains, which is the reason for this.

      • Jamie says:

        Thanks for your response. The webmaster tools site at Google produced an error on my site map file that said I needed to include the www. in the address. I tried to figure this out by searching and experimenting for several hours. I checked Google webmaster tools again for the errors without getting anything figured out, and the message about adding in the www. was gone. Perhaps this was just a poorly worded error message from Google that is only shown while they are processing / indexing your site. I read about another user that reported the same problem / error, but they never posted what the solution was. Looks like the solution is simple, leave Google alone for a few hours to process your files. Thanks again, Jamie

  6. DC says:

    I love this plug-in, too. However, the option for absolute path (so I can have it index my whole site) doesn’t work. I get a build error. And his website doesn’t provide support in this area. So, I live with a blog xml sitemap and a main website xml sitemap. If you have any ideas on this, I’m all ears!

    Thanks!

    • DC,

      It’s not bad to have two sitemaps, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Just make sure both are submitted to Google Webmaster Tools and also make sure that they are both specified in your robots.txt file, like this:

      Sitemap: /sitemap.xml
      Sitemap: /blog/sitemap.xml

      The search engines should pick it up just fine then.

  7. HI,
    I just wanted to tell you that I have this plug-in running on a site with about 1,000 posts on it, and it is working well. I found that some odd symbols and characters in the names of pages will cause the site map build to fail, and the XML won’t validate. I’d had some of these odd / foreign characters appear in posts that I have imported directly into the database.
    I thought I would mentioned it in case anyone is seeing the xml validation fail and you don’t know why. I would check that your URL’s are all valid and that they look normal, without and unexpected characters in them.

    Thank You.

    Jamie

    • Thanks Jamie! Great insight for people that may want to generate an international xml sitemap for their site, but are having issues.

      So it’s a known problem and hopefully will be resolved in the future.

      Thanks!

  8. Vi says:

    Which WP version you are using? Upgraded 2.9.1 and sitemap generatos stopped to work :/

  9. It’s okay but on my larger blogs it doesn’t complete generation of an xml file and spout memory issues as the cause which is b.s. – has to be a plugin conflict but who knows which ones…

Trackbacks

    Powered by WP Hashcash