XML Sitemap & Google News for WordPress

XML and Google News Sitemaps to feed the hungry spiders. Multisite, WP Super Cache, Polylang and WPML compatible.

Description

This plugin dynamically creates dynamic feeds that comply with the XML Sitemap and the Google News Sitemap protocol. Multisite, Polylang and WPML compatible and there are no static files created.

There are options to control which sitemaps are enabled, which Post Types and archive pages (like taxonomy terms and author pages) are included, how Priority and Lastmod are calculated, who to ping and a possibility to set additional robots.txt rules from within the WordPress admin.

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 tweaking difficult plugin options.

You, or site owners on your Multisite network, will not be bothered with overly complicated settings like most other XML Sitemap plugins. The default settings will suffice in most cases.

An XML Sitemap Index becomes instantly available on yourblog.url/sitemap.xml (or yourblog.url/?feed=sitemap if you’re not using a ‘fancy’ permalink structure) containing references to posts and pages by default, ready for indexing by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Ask. When the Google News Sitemap is activated, it will become available on yourblog.url/sitemap-news.xml (or yourblog.url/?feed=sitemap-news), ready for indexing by Google News. Both are automatically referenced in the dynamically created robots.txt on yourblog.url/robots.txt to tell search engines where to find your XML Sitemaps. Google and Bing will be pinged on each new publication.

Please read the FAQ’s for info on how to get your articles listed on Google News.

Compatible with caching plugins like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache and Quick Cache that cache feeds, allowing a faster serving to the impatient (when hungry) spider.

NOTES:

  1. 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.
  2. On large sites, it is advised to use a good caching plugin like WP Super Cache, Quick Cache, W3 Total Cache or another to improve your site and sitemap performance.

Features

  • Compatible with multi-lingual sites using Polylang or WPML to allow all languages to be indexed equally.
  • Option to add new robots.txt rules. These can be used to further control (read: limit) the indexation of various parts of your site and subsequent spread of pagerank across your sites pages.
  • Includes XLS stylesheets for human readable sitemaps.
  • Sitemap templates and stylesheets can be overridden by theme template files.

XML Sitemap

  • Sitemap Index includes posts, pages and authors by default.
  • Optionally include sitemaps for custom post types, categories and tags.
  • Sitemap with custom URLs optional.
  • Custom/static sitemaps can be added to the index.
  • Works out-of-the-box, even on Multisite installations.
  • Include featured images or attached images with title.
  • Pings Google, Bing & Yahoo on new post publication.
  • Options to define which post types and taxonomies get included in the sitemap.
  • Updates Lastmod on post modification or on comments.
  • Set Priority per post type, per taxonomy and per individual post.
  • Exclude individual posts and pages.

Google News Sitemap

  • Required news sitemap tags: Publication name, language, title and publication date.
  • Set a News Publication Name or uses site name.
  • Supports custom post types.
  • Limit inclusion to certain post categories.
  • Pings Google on new publications, once per 5 minutes.

Pro Features

Google News Advanced

  • Multiple post types – Include more than one post type in the same News Sitemap.
  • Keywords – Add the keywords tag to your News Sitemap. Keywords can be created from Tags, Categories or a dedicated Keywords taxonomy.
  • Stock tickers – Add stock tickers tag to your News Sitemap. A dedicated Stock Tickers taxonomy will be available to manage them.
  • Ping log – Keep a log of the latest pings to Google with exact date and response status.

Privacy / GDPR

This plugin does not collect any user or visitor data nor set browser cookies. Using this plugin should not impact your site privacy policy in any way.

Data that is published

An XML Sitemap index, referencing other sitemaps containing your web site’s public post URLs of selected post types that are already public, along with their last modification date and associated image URLs, and any selected public archive URLs.

A Google News Sitemap containing your web site’s public and recent (last 48 hours) URLs of selected news post type, along with their publication time stamp and associated image URL.
An author sitemap can be included, which will contain links to author archive pages. These urls contain author/user slugs, and the author archives can contain author bio information. If you wish to keep this out of public domain, then deactivate the author sitemap and use an SEO plugin to add noindex headers.

Data that is transmitted

Data actively transmitted to search engines is your sitemap location and time of publication. This happens upon each post publication when at least one of the Ping options on Settings > Writing is enabled. In this case, the selected search engines are alerted of the location and updated state of your sitemap.

Contribute

If you’re happy with this plugin as it is, please consider writing a quick rating or helping other users out on the support forum.

If you wish to help build this plugin, you’re very welcome to translate it into your language or contribute code on Github.

Credits

XML Sitemap Feed was originally based on the discontinued plugin Standard XML Sitemap Generator by Patrick Chia. Since then, it has been completely rewritten and extended in many ways.

Installation

WordPress

I. If you have been using another XML Sitemap plugin before, check your site root and remove any created sitemap.xml, sitemap-news.xml and (if you’re not managing this one manually) robots.txt files that remained there.

II. Install plugin by:

Quick installation via Covered Web Services !

… OR …

Search for “xml sitemap feed” and install with that slick Plugins > Add New admin page.

… OR …

Follow these steps:

  1. Download archive.
  2. Upload the zip file via the Plugins > Add New > Upload page … OR … unpack and upload with your favourite FTP client to the /plugins/ folder.

III. Activate the plugin on the Plugins page.

Done! Check your sparkling new XML Sitemap by visiting yourblogurl.tld/sitemap.xml (adapted to your domain name of course) 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.

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.

Uninstallation

Upon uninstalling the plugin from the Admin > Plugins page, plugin options and meta data will be cleared from the database. See notes in the uninstall.php file.

On multisite, the uninstall.php can loop through all sites in the network to perform the uninstalltion process for each site. However, this does not scale for large networks so it only does a per-site uninstallation when define('XMLSF_MULTISITE_UNINSTALL', true); is explicitly set in wp-config.php.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where are the options?

On Settings > Reading you can enable the XML Sitemap Index and (if needed) the Google News Sitemap. There is also an Additional robots.txt rules field.

Once a sitemap is enabled, its options can be found on Settings > XML Sitemap or on Settings > Google News.

Ping settings can be found on Settings > Writing.

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 Search Console account to check its validity and performance. Create an account if you don’t have one yet.

Can I manipulate values for Priority and Changefreq?

You can find default settings for Priority on Settings > XML Sitemap. A fixed priority can be set on a post by post basis too.

Changefreq has been dropped since version 4.9 because it is no longer taken into account by Google.

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.

Besides that, Google and Bing are pinged upon each new publication by default.

NOTE: 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, then read Do I need to change my robots.txt for more instructions.

Does this plugin ping search engines?

Yes, Google and Bing are pinged upon each new publication. Unless you disable this feature on Settings > Writing.

Do I need to change my robots.txt?

In normal circumstances, if you have no static 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 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.xml

If 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 yourblog.url/?feed=sitemap does produce a feed. Now manually upload your own robots.txt file to your website root containing:

Sitemap: http://yourblog.url/?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 Search Console 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 is yourblogurl.tld/sitemap.xml but if you have the Permalink Default option set the feed is only available via yourblog.url/?feed=sitemap.

I see no sitemap.xml file in my site root!

There is no actual file created. The sitemap is dynamically generated just like a feed.

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 one. Remove that file and let the plugin dynamically generate it just like a feed. There will not be any actual files 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.”

The Google News sitemap is designed to NOT be cached.

I get an ERROR when opening the sitemap or robots.txt!

The absolute first thing you need to check is your blogs privacy settings. Go to Settings > Privacy and make sure you are allowing search engines to index your site. If they are blocked, your sitemap will not be available.

Then, you might want to make sure that there is at least ONE post published. WordPress is known to send 404 status headers with feed requests when there are NO posts. Even though the plugin tries to prevent that, in some cases the wrong status header will get sent anyway and Google Search Console will report a vague message like:

We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap.
Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be
accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit.

If that did not solve the issue, check the following errors that might be encountered along with their respective solutions:

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 known 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://yourblog.url/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!

XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document

This error occurs when blank lines or other output is generated before the start of the actual sitemap content. This can be caused by blank lines at the beginning of wp-config.php or your themes functions.php or by another plugin that generates output where it shouldn’t. You’ll need to test by disabling all other plugins, switching to the default theme and manually inspecting your wp-config.php file.

I see only a BLANK (white) page when opening the sitemap

There are several cases where this might happen.

Open your sitemap in a browser and look at the source code. This can usually be seen by hitting Ctrl+U or right-click then select ‘View source…’ Then scan the produced source (if any) for errors.

A. If you see strange output in the first few lines (head tags) of the source, then there is a conflict or bug occuring on your installation. Please go to the Support forum for help.

B. If the source is empty or incomplete then you’re probably experiencing an issue with your servers PHP memory limit. In those cases, you should see a messages like PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted. in your server/account error log file.

This can happen on large sites. To avoid these issues, there is an option to split posts over different sitemaps on Settings > XML Sitemap. Try different settings, each time revisiting the main sitemap index file and open different sitemaps listed there to check.

Read more on Increasing memory allocated to PHP (try a value higher than 256M) or ask your hosting provider what you can do.

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+ both with normal activation and with Network Activate / Site Wide Activate.

623 Comments

Hi Franz, there is no need to change any CHMOD or other server settings. This plugin creates feeds, not files. See http://www.ueberlingen2020.de/?feed=sitemap but for the feeds to be accessible via their pretty permalink URL, there should not be any actual files with the same name/URI… In your case, it looks like there is an empty file called sitemap.xml in your site root. Delete it and you should be fine. If there is no such file, then there might be a redirection rule in your .htaccess that is interfering here.

Hi!

Firstly, thanks for a wonderful plugin, It has worked wonders for us.

However, on our excerpt, it is displaying some coding of our site (due to it having to be on a static page); is there anyway of editing the Google News Sitemap to prevent this and using actual article excerpt?

Cheers,
Lewis.

Hi Lewis, could you share a link to your news sitemap? I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “displaying some coding of our site”… It might be something I need to fix in the plugin itself.

OK, I see… Sadly, there is no tag available ( see http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74288 ) where one can specify the excerpt. Apparently, it’s up to Google News to decide what to do. It might be because your post source code shows <meta
name="description" content="">
at the beginning of the head section, later on followed by a second description meta tag that does represent the content but it might be that Google News only looks at the first empty one and then decides to simply take the first readable text from the source which is in your case the logo alt text and menu… Is there any way to remove that empty description meta tag from your themes header.php or wherever it is coming from?

Hi Marek, did you switch to URL modifications: The language code, for example /en/, is added to all urls when using pretty permalinks maybe? I have not tested with that option so it might be related to that… I’ll try to reproduce this on a test site.

Ah yes, that’s it… Polylang behaves a bit differently with that setting these days, apparently. Will release a bugfix release asap 🙂

Uploading a bugfix release (.3) right now. It will be available as upgrade on your site soon. Please let me know if you find any remaining issues. Thanks for reporting 🙂

Hi,
Is it possible to make it so only posts with certain tags show up in the Google News sitemap, but all posts show up in normal sitemap? i.e. If I tag a post as ‘news’, I want it to be part of a google news sitemap, but if I don’t have the ‘news’ tag I just want it to be part of the regular sitemap ONLY, and not show up on the News one.

Just install it and even if you’re not using it (either not activated or switched off at the options) then you’ll see the next update coming by 🙂

Hi Julia, there are some options on your Settings > Reading admin page but basically your sitemap should be accessible via /sitemap.xml already. If it’s not, there is something wrong. See the FAQ’s for some troubleshooting tips. If you need more help, send me an e-mail or post your question on the support forum 🙂

Hi, I think I found a bug. My robots.txt shows news site map as site.com/sitemap-news.xml , which is fine, but if I try to access http://www.site.com/sitemap-news.xml (note the www), I get a ‘error loading stylesheet’ error. Not sure if this would have any effect on google news indexing, but either way shouldn’t it still show up regardless of ‘www’ being present?

Hi Jimmy,

On all my sites, where there is www. defined in front of the domain name, any request for any page (including the sitemaps) without that www. get redirected to with www.

The same thing (but inversed) for sites without www.

I have no idea why your WordPress installation would behave differently. How do regular RSS feeds on your site respond with and without www?

Do you have a link to your site? You can send via the contact page if you like.

Great plug in with one key missing feature, the ability to exclude a page or post from the sitemap. We have “thank you” pages and other non-content pages … that we don’t want indexed. I would not suggest that you use a custom category or tag, but rather add a sitemap option on the post and page edit screen.

SCSweeney, you can exclude individual post and pages. Edit the page you want to exclude and find the XML Sitemap box at the side there. Check the option Exclude from sitemap.

Great plugin – thanks!
Got a slight problem though – the sitemap.xml is generated fine, and it links to 6 other sitemaps, the first 3 work, but the last 3 give 404 errors

Hi Martin, those are custom post types. Does this post type have any special features or custom permalinks? Could you try resaving the main permalink structure? Go to Settings > Permalinks and just save the options, no need to actually change them…

hi, since last update i am getting the following error
Too many redirects occurred trying to open “http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml”. This might occur if you open a page that is redirected to open another page which then is redirected to open the original page.
any ideas ?
i dont want google to hammer me for this lol

Strange, there should be no redirect at all… Do you have any rules in your .htaccess that do a redirect for sitemap.xml or general xml files? Have you got other plugins running that might be causing this? Could you try resaving the Permalink structure?

no rules in htaccess which effects xml

no other plugins as far as i know should be effecting this

tried resaving no difference

the google news xml works ok though

In fact, it looks like all sitemaps work. See …/?feed=sitemap and follow each link. Only the main sitemap index via the pretty URL gets hit by an unexplained redirect. Is there a Feedburner, SEO or Analytics plugin running? I notice you have two Google Analytics scripts in the page source (footer) effectively counting each visit twice. Could you switch off these kinds of plugins to see if that changes anything?

Otherwise, I don’t know what to tell you, other than to start fresh by switching the xml sitemap plugin off/on (or use the ‘reset all xml sitemap options’ checkbox) and if that does not help, switch off all other plugins and switch to the default theme… But I understand if you don’t want to do that on a live site.

yoastseo two googles running hmm will look into that, must be the theme and woo both using the same ID, the sitemap was running brill before the last update, it was only when google informed me so i checked, also running wordfence
did a reset of it, the thing is i am also seeing 404s from bing looking for sitemap.xml

Ben, looking at thenavigator.mobi I notice that there is another XML Sitemap (attracta something?) plugin running. Please disable that one first…

Hey, I’m a complete newbie, and have very little idea what I’m doing…so when you say submit your sitemap….where exactly do I find the information to submit. If I click on view sitemap in my settings I get a whole list…don’t know what is what? Also right at the top it says “This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.” Is this wrong?
http://www.esl-tastic.com/sitemap.xml

Hi Sue, your site is currently returning a timeout (118) error so I cannot actually see your sitemap but I suggest you start by making sure (via FTP) there is NO static sitemap.xml or robots.txt file in your site root. And make sure you are not using any other XML Sitemap plugin besides this one. If you are using any SEO plugin, make sure to disable the XML Sitemap generated by that plugin… Then go and check the sitemap on http://www.esl-tastic.com/?feed=sitemap and see if it is the same as http://www.esl-tastic.com/sitemap.xml
If it is not, then see the previous tips. If all is well, then go to your Google adn/or Bing Webmasters Tools account and submit your sitemap there using the URL http://www.esl-tastic.com/sitemap.xml

Hi Joshb, there is no compression done because the output is a feed, not a file. However, if you install WP Super Cache and configure it correctly and depending on your server, you might be able to get compression 🙂

Hi,
there’s a subtle yet nasty bug in the sitemap index when the sitemap is splitted by month:
the link to the monthly sitemap is built like “sitemap-posttype-post.201307.xml” and that url returns the whole year’s posts, not just the month’s ones !!

Changing the url to “…201307.xml” fixes the issue.

Hence I did a very quick fix to the plugin, maybe you’d apply it (or fix the bug in other ways) in upcoming releases

Here’s the patch

— core.php 2013-07-01 15:39:49.000000000 +0200
+++ core2.php 2013-07-09 18:41:22.000000000 +0200
@@ -201,7 +201,7 @@
global $wpdb;
$return = array();
if ( ‘monthly’ == $type ) {
– $query = “SELECT YEAR(post_date) AS `year`, MONTH(post_date) AS `month`, count(ID) as posts FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = ‘$post_type’ AND post_status = ‘publish’ GROUP BY YEAR(post_date), MONTH(post_date) ORDER BY post_date DESC”;
+ $query = “SELECT YEAR(post_date) AS `year`, LPAD(MONTH(post_date),2,’0′) AS `month`, count(ID) as posts FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = ‘$post_type’ AND post_status = ‘publish’ GROUP BY YEAR(post_date), MONTH(post_date) ORDER BY post_date DESC”;
$key = md5($query);
$cache = wp_cache_get( ‘xmlsf_get_archives’ , ‘general’);
if ( !isset( $cache[ $key ] ) ) {

Hi Andrea, yes you are right. Thanks for sharing your fix! It will be addressed in the next release 🙂

Hi Abhishesh,
I use xml-sitemap-feed in a actual WP Multisite environment. The plugin works fine for the most sites. The plugin is installed as a “normal” plugin and activated for all sites. Installing the plugin in /wp-content/mu-plugins/ as described above did NOT work!
On a new site i have activated searchabiliy for SE now but i always got an error opening sitemap.xml: there are three blank lines before <?xml
Any advice?

HI Ralph, thanks for sharing your experience with installing it in /mu-plugins/. I’ll remove that part from the instructions because it is generally recommended to install it in /plugins/ and simply Network Activate it.

As I understand it, you chose to activate it site by site which should work too. But on one site, there are three blank lines inserted before the opening xml tag. This is indeed a problem. Are there three blank lines inserted before the start of your theme source code output too? And what about (other) feed output? Usually blank lines come from modified files like wp-config.php but as this is on a network installation and other sites do not suffer these blank lines, it might be a plugin that is running on that particular site…

What other plugins are activated on that site? Can you share a URL?

Hi Abhishesh,
thank you for your friendly support. Your hint was right, the blank lines were in all theme output. The reason was found in functions.php of my child theme so I could solve the problem which was not caused by your plugin.

Hi Ralph, thanks for sharing your experience. As you found out, functions.php is another possible source of unwanted output. Even when the theme is not even used for the sitemaps… And it seems there is no simple way to prevent this. Bugger 🙁

Hi, You ahve a nice plugin and i was planning to use it for a client at http://cinemacover.com/sitemap.xml
However, i also got the same error:
—-
Invalid date
An invalid date was found. Please fix the date or formatting before resubmitting.
—-
On the /sitemap-posttype-page.xml

Here’s the screenshot.
[IMG]http://i43.tinypic.com/s3zmt1.png[/IMG]

Can you please look into it?\

Thanks

Hi AO, I cannot explain why the lastmod date fails like that… Can you try resaving the page?

In any case, you might want to set the page /home/ as your homepage on Settings > Reading or otherwise simply exclude it from the sitemap because it is a double of your sites root /. Either of these two will simply remove that page entry from the sitemap, which is better than having duplicate content like that.

Then, after all is working well, remember to remove the static sitemap.xml from your site root via FTP.

Thanks for the reply. Anyways, without doing what you suggested it has stopped showing error after i deactivated the plugin several times… turned it off for a couple of days and now it seems OK. Really surprised. 🙂 I’m yet to get the index figures

It looks like what you are saying is true…Since submission, not a single link has been indexed.

Can you please tell me how to remove the static file from what you said is Google Sitemap Generator plugin. Pls help as i have no idea on this.

Thank

Hi AO, you need to access your site via FTP and find that sitemap.xml file in the site root, where the main index.php and wp-config.php live. Then simply delete it 🙂

Hi John there seems to be an error occurring that has nothing to do with the PHP memory on your server. Can I ask you to test the current development version? You can download from http://wordpress.org/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/developers/ (see Other Versions). Download Development Version, unzip and upload via FTP overwriting your current version. Then please let me know and I can take a look again to see if the error persists…

Quick question, is it supposed to include posts marked as ‘private’ in the sitemap? Am I going to have to go in and flag all of those to be excluded manually?

Hi Ragey, you are seeing private posts in the sitemap because you are logged in. When logged out — as search engines tend to be 😉 — you’ll notice these posts are not listed.

Ah… I suppose that makes sense. Must have to do with the way it dynamically generates the sitemap as opposed to the way static files are usually created (I assume, but then we know what that does…)

Thanks for the help!

Hello,
Thanks for your work.
I have got 2 feeds in my website. “www.mysite.com/feed” doesn’t show all posts to avoid sites that automatically copy content from feeds.
I would like to know how can I show my second and hidden feed (with all posts) at the Sitemaps (News and regular).

Thanks in advanced,
Jorge

Hi Jorge, not sure I understand correctly but you want to include a custom URL in the XML Sitemap? This is currently not possible within the plugin but what you can do is create a static custom sitemap file called (for example) sitemap-custom.xml with that URL in it (read on the internet how a sitemap.xml file should be formed) and then include a reference to that file in the Additional robots.txt rules field on Settings > Reading: Sitemap: http://yourdomain.ext/sitemap-custom.xml

However, I’ll consider this as a feature request as it might prove useful as an option within the plugin 🙂

Sorry, my english is not really good. I’ll try to explain my problem again:
“XML & Google News Sitemap Feeds” plugin creates sitemap-news.xml using the page feed (www.site.com/feed/) but I’ve modified my feed because I don’t want it to show all my posts. However, I do want sitemap-news.xml to show all the posts. So, is there any way to tell this plugin to use another feed instead the default one?

Hi Jorge, no the plugin does not use your regular /feed/ so it does not matter if you modified it or not. The plugin creates its own feeds with their own rules. The News Sitemap on /sitemap-news.xml only includes posts published within the last 48 hours. These are the rules set by Google so you should not include ALL posts in /sitemap-news.xml… However, in /sitemap.xml (click through to the post_type sitemap) you will be able to find all posts without limitation.

Thanks for your answer. It’s wroking great now! I don’t know why it wasn’t working before. Just a question, is it posible to include the tags as keywords and the featured image at the News Sitemap? Thank you so much!

There was someone asking about category exclusion from the news sitemap last year, and you mentioned this would be present in the next release. I do not see it. Wanted to inquire as to status of this feature.

Hi Guru, it’s under Settgins > Reading… In the section “Include taxonomies” you can activate inclusion of categories and tags and others, if available. Or are you asking for control PER category?

Hi Guru, you are correct. This is not completely implemented yet so it has been postponed to the next release. But it WILL come next time!

Hi,
I’m trying this plugin but I have an error when I enter to the sitemap-posttype-post.YEAR.xml (not found).
Coud it be a re-write problen in the .htaccess ? I think in my site .htaccess can’t be modified by a plugin since we have a hacking attack. Should we add it manually?
Thanks.

Hi Sebastian, no there is no need for special .htaccess rules. Unless, of course, some custom .htaccess rule is preventing access to any particular sitemap… Can you share a URL to your site?

Hi Sebastian, Excellent! May I ask how many posts in total you have on your site? And what the PHP memory limit (if you know that of course) ? I’d like to be able to make the plugin better ‘predict’ which option to choose upon activation… All user cases are helpful 🙂

Hi Mladen, qTranslate is kind of hard to integrate in the sense that I find it somewhat unpredictable (across updates) plus I don’t use it any more and it’s a lot of work to keep a multi-lingual test site around just for that. That said, XML Sitemap Feeds was once compatible with qTranslate (and even Xlanguage) and I might find some time to do basic testing to see if I can bring that old code back to life… Anyway, I recommend Polylang to all users and clients alike since it is a lot less heavy on the server and does not slow down WordPress response times as much. And I will very likely keep my plugins compatible with Polylang at all times 🙂

Many thanks for fast reply RavenH. I fully understand your standings, I just can not believe that there is no free multi-lingual solution with translated urls and sitemap for WordPress…

Well, with XML Sitemap Feeds + Polylang you get exactly that! It’s a bit of a hassle migrating (copy/pasting every translation to a new post) but after that you’ll be happy as a fish in a cool pond. 🙂

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