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.
Download link: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/google-sitemap-generator.zip
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!
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.
I agree this is the best sitemap generator. It also works pretty good for SEO.
Yup! I have another post coming out soon about HTML sitemaps, aside from just XML Sitemaps. Keep an eye out for it!
yup i agree with this google xml sitemap generator is the best one
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?
Hi Vlad, you do not need to add a link to your XML sitemap in your menu. An XML sitemap is a tool used for search engines to better crawl your site.
I would recommend checking out Dagon Sitemap Generator Plugin for a regular sitemap.
Vlad, additionally what you can do is in your robots.txt file, add this:
Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
that way, when search engines hit your robots file, it will automatically be able to detect your sitemap.xml file.
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.
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
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.
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!
Which WP version you are using? Upgraded 2.9.1 and sitemap generatos stopped to work :/
We’re running 2.9.1 here and it works without a problem.
Check out our sitemap here: http://wpvibe.com/sitemap.xml
Thanks. Will check what is going on with my site, as I even can’t see plugin’s settings.
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…
Try raising the allowed memory usage by PHP. I have mine set at 128mb, which is more than sufficient for thousands of posts.
I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to make it work, but though it says it has created a sitemap and successfully notified the search engines, both the .xml and .gz folders remain empty even though they’re set to 777 and the root to 776 in CHMOD.
The only debug error I receive is under MySQL Queries: “Please edit wp-db.inc.php in wp-includes and set SAVEQUERIES to true if you want to see the queries.” Trouble is, there is no wp-db.inc.php within the wp-includes directory.
Would love to get this program working. It gets great reviews.
I would first talk to your web host about the issue, it sounds like a problem with their web server configuration.
I’ve never run into that problem before.
Check to see which version of PHP your web host is running. If they aren’t on PHP 5.x yet, encourage them to upgrade to a version of PHP5 they are comfortable with.
but google cant read my sitemap :(
Anyone know if there are plans for this plugin to auto generate a video sitemap?
I have a site that contains a lot of embeded video – failquail.com and would love to automatically generate video sitemap data for old posts.
there is currently nothing available yet because there’s no way to really systemically know that, except if it were to scan each post, each time.
It would probably need to hook into a custom field on each post, and would be very custom.
I don’t really foresee this ever being an option either, but that’s not to say it won’t be.
Hi, When you use a auto site map generator, is there any possible risk of it doing more harm than good? vs not having a site map.
Thanks in advance.
it’s been recommended by the search engines that you have an XML sitemap, as it helps the search engines know where to crawl. it shouldn’t ever hurt your site, but that’s not to say it’s not possible.
The problem is, I still wonder whether to include tags and categories in the sitemap. This plugin is great. Customizable enough while being simple enough.
If they are pages you want indexed, I would recommend having them in the sitemap then.