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

First off, what a terrific plugin. Thanks for creating it!

I just upgraded to XML Sitemap Feed 3.8.6 using the WP upgrade panel. The sitemap plugin was working fine before the upgrade, but I immediately got an database error when the admin upgrade page reloaded after the upgrade was complete. I deactivated the plugin, then tried to re-activated it. I get this error:

Fatal error: Undefined class name ‘self’ in http://pinnaclepres.org/HaitiInitiative/wp-content/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/xml-sitemap.php on line 129

The first error on admin page reload pointed to line 171.

Any suggestions on what might have changed between versions to have caused this? And what the solution might be?

Thanks in advance!

Hmmm… that might be a PHP version issue. Do you know what version is installed on your hosts server by any chance? Anyway, will look into it and release a fix ASAP. Thanks for reporting 🙂

Hi, I posted this on the support forum, but not sure if it got thru (don’t see it in the threads) so just in case asking here as well:

I have a Russian-language website http://ruauto.infonex.us, attempt to generate a sitemap for it: http://ruauto.infonex.us/sitemap.xml does’t work and often I get a weird “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 64 bytes)” in /wp-includes/meta.php or /wp-includes/wp_db.php (running WP 3.01). I don’t think it’s a amount of posts issue, because English-language sites with quite large number of posts generate correct sitemap e.g. http://travel.infonex.us/sitemap.xml

Please help.

Do you get that error in the log files or on screen? When I open your sitemap, I see that it does not contain any URLS (and my browser throws an error because of that) but why that happens, I could not tell you. How many posts are on that site? How much memory is allowed for PHP on the server?

@RavanH Thanks for the prompt reply! I noticed that I get that error when I first try to load the site map (the error is shown in the source of generated XML). On the consecutive loads error doesn’t show, all I get is urlset header, but still no URLs).

There’re over 4500 posts on that site, so come to think of it, it may be a number of posts issue.

Not sure how to check PHP memory allocation on the BlueHost, and I don’t think I have control over it in any case. If this is because of number of posts – is there away to reduce memory footprint while generating the map?

In feed-sitemap.php there is the main query :
`
query_posts( array(
‘post_type’ => ‘any’,
‘post_status’ => ‘publish’,
‘caller_get_posts’ => 1,
‘nopaging’ => true,
‘posts_per_page’ => -1 )
);
`
You might try to remove the line `’nopaging’ => true,` and change the number behind `’posts_per_page’ => ` from -1 to a fixed number. Try 1000 for instance. If you still get the error, try a lower number until you reach a working sitemap.

Downside ofcourse is that your sitemap is not complete and you’ll have to do this after each upgrade of the plugin…

Are you running any other plugins that might put extra load on the query memory usage?

I see, but that seems to be only a half solution. Could you perhaps post an update that doesn’t load all the posts into memory at once? It can be a problem for many blogs with large number of posts and if it’s not a problem now – it can definitely become one in the future. Maybe use paging indeed to load smaller subset of posts at a time and in an outer loop go thru all the pages? I am no PHP expert, but it seems logical.
Also I do use a few other plugins, but nothing really memory-intense.

I agree it’s not a solution, just a quick-fix to test if it really is a memory issue… You see the parts “67108864 bytes … (tried to allocate 64 bytes)” in the error message strike me as funny. BlueHost by default allows for 32MB while 67108864 bytes is 64MB. And either way, allocating 64bytes should not be a problem at all 😉

Since I do not have a WP site with that many posts on it, I’d like to ask you to test a little before I can decide what approach would work best here. So if you could perform the test I described earlier, and report me the results, I ‘d be grateful 🙂

Another fix might be to increase the memory limit as shown on http://tutorials.bluehost.com/memory/ to see if that changes anything. And with such a large site, you might also consider using at least some basic caching plugin like Quick Cache.

Thanks for providing link to Bluehost’s PHP memory management. Actually I used both of your suggestions – I wanted the map to show at least 2000 links, so I modified query_posts paging parameters, but it still caused memory error, so I adjusted memory allocation in PHP.INI and now it works.
But an update is appreciated anyway 🙂

It’s in the development version 3.9 🙂 which — by the way — also includes a Google News Sitemap ( for those that are curious and willing to test… )

Hi again 🙂 First make sure you visit your sitemap while NOT being logged in to your WordPress site to make Super Cache do its full song and dance… Do you have a link to your sitemap for me?

@hoball
Donncha, the brain behind WP Super Cache, suggests you try running Super Cache with the Debug option ON to find out what might cause the page regeneration. I suppose you can find more info on debugging in the Super Cache source code…

I am a bit confused about the robots text file. This is what my robots.txt has in it

Sitemap: http://deskofbrian.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://deskofbrian.com/sitemap-news.xml

I understand the sitemap.xml and sitemap-news.xml but I am not sure if the statement above those two is required to be there. Also, I have a sitemap at sitemap-xml which is really up to date. My first question is:

1. Is my robots.txt file correct or should I rebuild it with the sitemap-xml file included instead of the .xml file?
2. I am using all in one webmaster which submits to google, bing, yahoo etc… and they are asking for my sitemap under the settings, which sitemap do I type into their plugin?
Note: I built my sitemap with xml-sitemaps.com due to memory errors from my hosting company, which may explain the multiple sitemaps. Thank you in advance.

Hi Brian, I fear you may be missing the point of the XML Sitemap Feed plugin… On your website you seem to have used a standalone sitemap generator that creates a sitemap.xml file. My plugin does NOT create a static file but instead creates a dynamic feed, managed by WordPress. What you see on http://deskofbrian.com/sitemap-news.xml, http://deskofbrian.com/sitemap-xml and even http://deskofbrian.com/?feed=sitemap are exacly that.

To let XML Sitemap Feed do its work to the full extend, you need to remove the static sitemap.xml file from your site root. After that, the dynamic feed will become accessible and you can use the standard URL http://deskofbrian.com/sitemap.xml for your sitemap submission.

The robots.txt is correct. That first line beginning with a # tag is just a comment and will be ignored by all search engines. The first ‘Sitemap: …’ entry is what they will be looking for and if you have submitted your site to Google News, the second one will serve you well too 🙂

By the way, I notice you are using WP Super Cache on your site. This is a good idea and will cache your (large) sitemap too for better performance.

hi,
i use your sitemap plugin and i have got the ok from google to be listed in google news.
(b.t.w -great plugin, works fine in multisite – AND with qtranslate)
i use AIOSEO – and rewrite my titles (for seo reasons) – news stiemap doesn’t take the rewrited titles – so i woundered – if this would be possible?

thanks a lot, johann

Hi Johan, I have no experience with AIOSEO… How does it rewrite the titles exactly? Is there some theme adaptation needed for that?

The News Sitemap prints it’s post titles with like most normal themes do so I’d expect a plugin that changes post titles to work just the same here. Unless that plugin does not manipulate post titles in feeds… Is that the case with AIOSEO?

hi, i have seen – AIOSEO doesn’t rewrite the titles in feeds – mh i will try at first to make my titles seo like -then i don’t need to rewrite titles..

for example: i have authors example title:
HASCHER JEHLE Architektur -> title in post
HASCHER JEHLE Architektur – Profile | Springer Architektur -> title for google results.
b.t.w. – google gives a failur for the news-sitemap in english – i guess cause i suggested to google only in german language?

Unexpected language
The language specified in your sitemap does not match any of the languages we have for your publication in our database. Please check that you have specified your language code correctly. Language should be an ISO 639 Language Code (either 2 or 3 letters). Exception: For Chinese, please use zh-cn for Simplified Chinese or zh-tw for Traditional Chinese.

Johann, could you give me the URL of the news sitemap that is reported as having the wrong language code ? And is that the same URL as is accepted by Google News ?

Thanks for the prompt response Johann. I have gone into the root and deleted the sitemap.xml file, and I then resubmitted it to google webmasters. I am hoping this works. Also, do I need to do anything with your plugin since I made the changes?

Brian, it looks like your sitemap (on /sitemap.xml) is correct. It’s cached and gzipped and all is working well. You need to do nothing more. WordPress in combo with Super Cache and XML Sitemap Feed will keep your sitemap up-to-date. That’s the beauty of the feed approach 🙂

Johann, not clear on what the problem is exactly, I will send you a direct e-mail. Let’s see if we can figure this out…

Hi Michael, have you got a link to your sitemap feed for me? And where are you trying to validate the feed?

Hi,
To start with, I’d like to thank you for this fantastic plugin.
It works superbly except for a little glitch, once solved will allow us to use this plugin on our website.
The plugin is generating sitemap.xml and robots.txt but sitemap-news.xml gives 404. I checked that feed=sitemap and feed=sitemap-news are both being generated.
Any solutions for this?

The plugin is designed with Multi-site in mind so a generic WPMS .htacces should not be the problem. Did you do add any custom rules in there?

On first note: It sounds like a Permalink problem. Activate the plugin and re-save your permalink settings. Then check the /sitemap-news.xml url again…

I notice on your site there is the Arne Brachhold’s Google Sitemap Generator plugin running. Make sure you remove all static files that are created by that plugin, including any rewrite (and maybe even .htaccess?) rules. Also remove any static robots.txt file to allow every site on your network to have it’s own version with the respective sitemap url(s) in it.

If it still does not work, please give me a link where I can see the problem live…

Hi

I’m running a WPMS 3.03 and your plugin for a while, just updated from the former release. It works for the main domain http://1a-sales.com only, while all other sites, eg. strassen-030.de/sitemap.xml download my blog feed – http://feeds.strassen-030.de/mind-map in this case. Yes, robots.txt is present, everything is done as mentioned above.

Having your note in mind, I just submitted all of the new sitemaps anyway, to Google (some of them were accepted, some were not) and Bing (accepted all) ?!
In GWT, the active ones display Zero or less pages indexed than before – I’ve used “Google XML Sitemaps with Multisite support” for all the sub-sites, until today.

Maybe it’s a conflict with another plugin:
All in One SEO Pack
WordPress MU Domain Mapping
Proper Network Activation
FeedBurner FeedSmith
RSS Includes Pages
WP Super Cache
..and others that I guess don’t matter in this context, but neither BuddyPress nor Event-List.

To be honest, I don’t want to stop using one of them, cause there are 10 live sites dependent on any change. I’ve returned to the parallel use, which is not a satisfying solution.

Maybe You can help, thanks in advance,

Mathias

Domain Mapping and Super Cache should not be a problem but any of the other plugins might cause conflict. I’d be especially suspicious of the two plugins that meddle with FEEDS… My plugin creates two new feeds and they might be affected by any other plugin that changes either URL or content of your feeds.

What about Proper Network Activation. Did you have that active while Network Activating my plugin? It should not be necessary. I have no experience with that plugin but it might cause some kind of conflict too.

And is Arne Brachhold’s sitemap plugin still active on strassen-030.de for instance? That will surely cause conflict 🙂
I still see http://strassen-030.de/sitemaps/strassen-030-de.xml.gz referenced in http://strassen-030.de/robots.txt… If that plugin is deactiavted, please remove any files AND .htaccess rules it has created. And to be sure, re-save the Permalink sructure…

Thanks for the reply. I will try out the permalinks again.
I am not trying the plugin on the live site as yet, it is on a copy of the live site that I maintain on my local machine at work. Which, unfortunately, is only accessible locally in the office.
If need be, I will try to replicate it on another one of our test sites that can be accessible from outside.

Hi Joaquín, it looks like everything else works, like you Google News sitemap on http://ntrzacatecas.com/sitemap-news.xml for instance… How many posts does your site hold at this moment? I would not be surprised if your server runs out of memory loading ALL posts and pages while building the sitemap. Do you see any errors in the server/php error log files? Can you increase the memory limit in your server/account settings? If not, edit xml-sitemap.php line 49 from
define('XMLSF_MEMORY_LIMIT','128M');
to
define('XMLSF_MEMORY_LIMIT','256M');
for instance.

Hi Darryl,

You are using ‘Default’ permalinks.

With those ‘non-pretty URLs’ (your post URLs are like /?p=123) the sitemap feed will only be available via http://roadrunnerrunningshoes.info/?feed=sitemap . If you tell Google there is a sitemap available on that URL, it will be indexed without problem. But in light of better SEO, I would advise you to switch to another permalink structure like ‘Year, month and name’ or at least any custom structure with %postname% in it like /product/%postname%/ or something. But avoid using ONLY /%postname%/ because that is likely to cause confusing problems…

After this, the sitemap will be available via /sitemap.xml but more importantly there will be a fresh new http://roadrunnerrunningshoes.info/robots.txt plus your post and category titles will appear in the URLs which is a BIG plus for your sites search engine performance 🙂

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 🙂

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 '

with

echo '

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.

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 🙂

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.

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?

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 '

(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 😉

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 🙂

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