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.

620 Comments

I have a WordPress Multisite installation using subdirectories.

I am using a plugin called Domain Mapping.

Sitemaps are generated for all of my installed blogs EXCEPT for the main domain.

Please refresh your Permalink structure: Go on your main blogs (!) admin pages to Settings > Permalinks and hit “Save Changes“. No need to actually change anything, just re-save. Then check the sitemap again by reloading it with Ctrl+R (or Cmd+R on a Mac?) …

Let me know if that did not do the trick. Please provide plugin version number and a link to the 404 page.

I have done as you suggested having read the installation instructions.

I have installed and unisntalled a number of times as a plugin and as mu plugin.

I have tried network and individual.

I have rebooted my computer.

Here is the main domain:

http://tydbytes.com/sitemap.xml
http://tydbytes.com/feed/sitemap.xml

Neither works.

Here are 2 of the sites that work beautifully with either feed setup:

http://living-in-the-moment.com/sitemap.xml
http://richardeward.com/feed/sitemap.xml

I’m looking forward to solving this as this is a very sweet plugin.

Thanks

Hmmm… I notice you are using BuddyPress on the main blog? I have no experience with BP. Any chance you could switch it of for a moment and ( for example with the Twenty Ten theme enables) test to see if the sitemap comes alive on the main site then?

You might have hit some incompatibility / conflict with BuddyPress here. Or maybe there is another plugin active on the main blog that is not activated on any of the other sites?

I see that you are using the custom permalink structure /%postname%/ … that has in the past caused problems in WP so what if you temporarily switch to one of the preset ones like “Day and Name” for instance?

Oh, and thanks for testing 🙂

I agree, it’s not the solution. But still, with any Permalink structure you choose, http://tydbytes.com/?feed=sitemap will output a sitemap so if you submit that URL in Google Webmaster Tools you’re sure that at least Google finds it… Until I find a cause + fix 🙂

Hi – Thanks for writing this cool plugin. I am using WP3 with multisites but when I moved the folder to the mu-plugins folder, WP doesn’t recongise/see the install so it doesn’t show in the list. Any ideas?

You need to move the file xml-sitemap.php one dir up. It should be in the /mu-plugins/ directory while the rest can remain in the /mu-plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/ directory.

NOTE: the plugin works just as well when in /plugins/ and “Network Activated” with the advantage that you can upgrade to new versions much easier 😉

When you switch to the ?p=123 Default Permalink structure, there will be NO robots.txt generated by WordPress and your sitemap will ONLY be available on http://imagebeijing.com/?feed=sitemap . Hence you were getting the 404’s on /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt after the switch too…

Looking at your site, I see you switched back to Pretty Permalinks and your sitemap.xml and robots.txt are working 🙂

Nope, no need for wp_header in your theme… In fact, XML Sitemap Feed uses its own template. It should work just fine 🙂

My sitemap on http://www.welt-der-pferde.de creates error messages in Google Webmaster tools, saying that the priority tag has a non valid value in it. Any clue what I can do about it?

BTW, your Sitemap plugin is a nice piece of work 🙂 I like the “no frills” and “no buttons” attitude 🙂

What seems to be going on on your site is the calculation has a comma instead of a point to separate the decimals… Normally, a priority of 40% should be written as 0.4 but in your case it is written as 0,4 … And now, Google does not have a clue what to do with that.

Coming from the Netherlands, I am familiar with the comma as decimal sign but I have never seen WordPress or PHP use other than points as decimal sign… Can you tell me what setting on either your server, PHP or in WP could be responsible for this?

Anyway, I’ve just uploaded a development version that should address this issue. You can download it from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/xml-sitemap-feed.zip but be careful it has not been tested yet 😉

I think it is the locale setting in PHP that is causing that… I will check in on that later and let you know 🙂

I have the same issue as reported by one more guy here, the sitemap does not show up, but if I look at the page source i can see the map, also it comes up in IE 8, and not in Google Crome and Mozilla, any ideas what is the issue and what will be the impact? will google be able to index the urls?

Sounds like an issue with the stylesheet loading… This will not be a problem for search engines (did you check your robots.txt output?) but I am interested in finding the cause of this problem that seems to keep coming back for a few people. Do you have a link for me?

Nayah, I took a look and see no problem with your sitemap. What I did notice is that your robots.txt file is useless. If you really want to manage your robots.txt file manually, you need to put each rule on a NEW line. Like now, all behind the first comment-line, search engines will ignore everything including the sitemap…

Another thing I noticed: You have created a folder /mu-plugins/ INSIDE /plugins/ where you then placed my plugin. If you want to use the XML Sitemap Feed as an MU plugin, move the folder /mu-plugins/ (and its content) one dir up into /wp-content/ … That way, every site in your network will have the plugin auto-activated.

One more tip: Disallow directory browsing on your server by default and only allow it for those folders that you explicitly want to be browsed. Your website security is at risk.

The permalink /%postname%/ for post has been known to cause problems since the beginning of WordPress. It’s reserved for pages and not something I can fix, I’m afraid.

You could give /%postname%/%post_id% a try… But anything simple in front is bound to work, like /-/%postname%/

Tested the permalink structures /%postname%/%post_id%, /-/%postname%/ and /%postname%/- for you. They all work.

Any of these you could live with, SEO-wise?

How did you set this up? CNAME? Anyway, the domain family-parenting-tips.com lands on the correct site but as soon as I follow a link on the front page, the URL changes to familyparentingtips.sweetoothmarketing… I can highly recommend the plugin WPMU Domain Mapping http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/ to take care of this for you. The XML Sitemap Feed will listen to how you configure the site’s primary domain in Domain Mapping and change the link URLs accordingly.

Another thing I notice is that you are using a static robots.txt file. Do you do that for that archiver exclusion rule? The easiest would be to remove the static file and leave it to WordPress + XML Sitemap Feed to take care of it. But if you want to stick to using the static file, you need to change the sitemap URLs to reflect the domains that you set up in Domain Mapping as the Primary domains!

Hallo Cor,

I have not tested with custom post types but I would be very interested in the result. The plugin will not create any database tables or even any extra options (only some new permalink rules that will disappear after deactivation). So you are safe to take it for a spin without creating extra clutter in your DB 🙂

Again, I’d be interested in the results and prepared to code a fix if need be!

Allard

Excellent! That’s good to hear 🙂 however, I am wondering if the priority calculation is working as it should. Which urls are pages and which are custom post types?

Oh, and may I suggest another one of my plugins Easy FancyBox to improve the image presentation?

Hi webmaster,
i use wp 3.01 in multi-site with domain mapping plugin, also i use robot meta and gresg high performance seo plugin.

and after all i get
Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred (805303f4)http://famex.wexpress.com.ar/wp-content/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/sitemap.xsl.php?v=3.8.5

any idea what’s happening?

Sorry pescadito, for the delay. Your comment got marked as spam by an over-zealous anti-spam plugin…

Your sitemap itself seems to be fine. It is just the stylesheet that does not seem to work right on your setup. This is not a problem for search engines. They ignore the stylesheet and it is there just for webmaster-eye-candy 🙂

But I can tell you what is going wrong: When requesting the URL of the stylesheet directly, it downloads and is complete so there is no reason why it should not work. Except for one thing: the URL domain of the sitemap (and site) is famex.com.ar while the URL domain of the sitemap stylesheet (and all other stylesheets, images and script files) is famex.wexpress.com.ar… For some reason this is not accepted by your browser which causes the error.

Are you using Donncha’s Domain Mapping plugin? Is it installed in /mu-plugins/ ? Do you have the domain famex.com.ar as Primary domain? If all of these, I wonder why the subdomain famex.wexpress.com.ar is still used for stylesheetsand other URLs in the page source…

Hi Ravan

I have your plugin installed on a WP3.0.1 site running MS mode. All working fine including submitting sitemap to Google Webmaster. Thanks for a great plugin.

My problem is this. When I create a new site (Super Admin/Sites/Add New) the Add Site button throws up this error:
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare xml_sitemap_load_template() (previously declared in /home/realesta/public_html/wp-content/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/xml-sitemap.php:71) in /home/realesta/public_html/wp-content/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/xml-sitemap.php on line 72

The new site is created ok but clearly there’s something wrong somewhere. I’m not sure where to start and have left a similar message to this on the WPMU Dev Forum. Would appreciate any assistance you can provide.

Regards

Peter

Peter, I cannot reproduce the problem. You have the plugin installed under /plugins/ like normal. Do you have it ‘Network Activated’? Any other plugins running on your network? And what happens if you move my plugin to /mu-plugins/ (I suppose you know what that means?) … still the same error?

I find it a bit worrying that WPMS (in your case) seems to try to load the same plugin file twice. Now I know that during the creation of a new site the system does a kind of identity switch where it does some setup routines as if called from the new site instead of from the site where you as Super Admin are on but this should not cause the plugin file being required for a second time…

Although it should not be necessary, I could code a ‘if not exists’ to prevent redeclaration. In itself, not a bad idea so I’ll plan that for the next release. Please let me know if there is any interesting response on the WPMU Dev forum (e-mail me) 🙂

Thanks for your patience and (again) for reporting the issue!
Allard

In answer to your questions earlier:

“How did you set this up? CNAME?”
>> I use the domain mapping tool and server IP address not CNAME

“the domain family-parenting-tips.com lands on the correct site but as soon as I follow a link on the front page, the URL changes to familyparentingtips.sweetoothmarketing… I can highly recommend the plugin WPMU Domain Mapping http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/ to take care of this for you.”

>>I use this plug-in but it doesn’t seem to change the fact that my subdomain shows up when clicking through a site.

“The XML Sitemap Feed will listen to how you configure the site’s primary domain in Domain Mapping and change the link URLs accordingly.”

>> My primary domain doesn’t show up in my domain mapping list. I dont know why but I know it is there because domain ID 1 is missing and I can’t add my primary domain to the list a second time.

I am still unable to get your plug-in to work via any TLDs. Any clues would be appreciated. I may have configured something wrong.

Another thing I notice is that you are using a static robots.txt file. Do you do that for that archiver exclusion rule? The easiest would be to remove the static file and leave it to WordPress + XML Sitemap Feed to take care of it. But if you want to stick to using the static file, you need to change the sitemap URLs to reflect the domains that you set up in Domain Mapping as the Primary domains!

>>I use this plug-in but it doesn’t seem to change the fact that my subdomain shows up when clicking through a site.

That’s odd…

>> My primary domain doesn’t show up in my domain mapping list. I dont know why but I know it is there because domain ID 1 is missing and I can’t add my primary domain to the list a second time.

I’m not talking about your Networks main domain here. It’s confusing, sorry. I mean that in WPMU Domain Mapping you can apply many domain names to one site (blog) but only one of those can be the ‘primary domain’ for that site (blog)… So each site in your network has at least one primary domain.

You should set it up like this:
1. On Super Admin > Domain Mapping have the correct IP address filled out (you already have that) then make sure that under Domain Options the box 2 is checked (the others are optional and only concern the back-end)
2. Go to Super Admin > Domains and make sure that the domain http://www.family-parenting-tips.com listed there as a YES in the column Primary. If not, hit Edit next to it and place a checkmark at Primary…

the fact that you do not see your main site domain there is on purpose. It would confuse things too much if you would be allowed to change the domain name of your main site through the Domain Mapping plugin.

Additional comment/question:

I noticed in Edit Site subpanel for all of my blogs there is a field called XML Sitemap with a value of “0”. Should this have something else in that field like a path or something?

That might be caused by another plugin. Not mine… If you have XML Sitemap Feed properly installed, you should be able to find a field called Xml-sitemap-feed-version with the latest version number (probably 3.8.5) as value. Is that the case?

Hi Ravan and sorry for the delay too, i just come today to come to see your answer.

I run a wp3.0.1 multisite with domain mapping plugin (i use the 2.1.1 wpmudev.org plugin), the main site is ‘wexpress.com.ar’, and the original child site ‘famex.wexpress.com.ar’ withc after domain mapping become ‘famex.com.ar’.

i understand the stylesheet come from different url (famex.wexpress.com.ar) but i don’t know what is needed to resolve the problem.

i really appreciate if you have any idea to it!

best regard, pescadito

I’ve tested the XML Sitemap Feed plugin with the Donncha’s domain mapping plugin that you are using: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/ . Not sure if that is comparable with the domain mapping plugin from WPMU Dev but if it is, this should not be happening…

However, I’m working on a new version that might solve your problem. It’s a long shot (which I cannot test) so please tell me if it doesn’t 🙂 It will be available at the end of this week, I hope.

Different browsers will react differently to the discrepancy in the domain name but like I said, search engines will not have a problem with it because they ignore the stylesheet completely.

Anyway, could you check version 3.8.6 to see if the ‘problem’ persists?

Hmmm…. and what settings for Domain Mapping do you use? Again, spiders will not have a problem with it so it’s not on my URGENT list 😉 but it would be nice to figure out what’s happening here. Do you use any caching (plugin or server) on your network?

Not sure what you mean by “settings”? We map domains with both A Records and CNAME. We keep the subdomain URL in the settings, we don’t switch both. I am using WP Super Cache as well.

I realize that bots see the page ,but it’s difficult to explain to end users who are concerned with these matters (sitemaps, Webmaster tools) that try and view the page and see an error.

I do appreciate your work on this plugin.

I mean the settings on Super Admin > Domain Mapping… I need to figure out why the WP internal function plugins_url() returns another domain than get_bloginfo(‘url’). At least, that is what I’m supposing here. What domain is used in the robots.txt for each site in your network? The mapped TLD domain or the original subdomain? If you have a link for me… 🙂

The robots.txt file has the mapped domain URL.

Using remote login & redirct administration pages to site’s original domain

Tested with those settings but cannot reproduce the problem… could you tell me if checking the option 4. Permanent redirect changes anything? What other plugins are you running (active / network active / in mu-plugins) ?

Sorry, I do have permanent redirect checked also.

I have quite a few network wide(mu) plugins, probably too many to list. Again, thank you for looking into it, I will try to some debugging on my end when I have a bit more time to commit to the issue, I’m a one man band running a couple multi-site installs, so I get pulled in several directions.

This is actually the simplest sitemap plugin ever! Thanks so much.

Question: Is there a way to remove a page or posts from the sitemap, but leave it Published on the site?

Thanks
Steve

Wanting to keep the plugin as simple as it is now, dictates that every public post and page is weighed, prioritized and included in the sitemap automatically. Only Private posts are excluded but then you would have to ask your readers to become (at least) a Subscriber to be able to read that post.

A workaround might be to use one of the SEO plugins that allow individual posts to use “noindex” meta to prevent indexing. I do not have experience with any SEO plugin so I cannot predict how XML Sitemap Feed will react to any of them but most likely the noindex posts will still be in the sitemap… If you get a chance to test with this idea, please report back your findings and I might consider coding for some extra compatibility in this area as I did for language/translation plugins like qTranslate and xLanguage.

Hello,
Thanks for the great plugin but I encounter a problem:

I am setting up a WP3.0.1 multisite (by Domain-Mapping plugin), and have the XML-Sitemap-Feed plugin placed in /mu-plugins/.

After following the instructions above, I try to access [domain]/sitemap.xml

In firefox, it bumps me with “Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occured (805303f4)”
http://[domain]p?v=3.8.6 ***<—- note the "p?v=3.8.6"

I checked the raw response using Firebug:

I then spent some time walking with the source: feed-sitemap.php

the function plugins_url() is called, and

before plugins_url() returns a value, the $url is actually correct.
*** expecting http://[domain]/wp-content/mu-plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/sitemap.xsl.php

However, after the apply_filters(‘plugins_url’, $url, $path, $plugin) function, it turns out: p?v=3.8.6

Since I am not familar with the WordPress Core, I am posting my findings for advice. If it is not a bug, please drop me a hint to resolve this issue. Thank you.

Hoball

Hi hoball,

It seems you are not the only one that has a setup where the WP core function plugins_url() does not return what it is supposed to. If I could only reproduce this particticular problem on one of my own installs, it would be much easier to figure out…

Thanks for reporting your findings. I will try once more to find out what is going wrong.

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