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

Hi NeedHelp, this plugin can only go as far as splitting by month. The maximum number of allowed URLs in a sitemap is 50k so that is not a problem but you’re probably running into a memory limit issue? Or maybe timeouts? Can you increase the max allowed PHP memory and timeout limit on your hosting platform? If not, you’ll probably need to start thinking about hosting that is more suitable for 10k posts per month… But even if you get it to work, maybe another sitemap solution is better for you because this one (it creates the sitemap as a feed on the fly) is probably too slow with such a huge number of posts.

First let me thank you for this great plugin,

Your plugin is the only sitemap which works with WP Subdomains that turns categories into subdomains and my problem is that I have got a very active website and the split option which you implanted only splits sitemaps into years and months. Google webmaster tools says that two of my sitemaps can not be loaded… I checked it using safari and chrome and they did not work.

they include more than 5K urls.

Now would you please tell me how can I regenerate them or figure a way to solve this issue ?

Thank you very much.

Hi Ali, so you have set the Split by option to Month and you still have two months where the sitemap is not generated?

This probably means the query is still just too big and the plugin runs into either the PHP memory limit or a timeout limit that is set on your server. You’ll have to check the error logs to find out more. You can then try ajusting the limit(s) in question to get the two remaining sitemaps live.

But be aware that even if you get them live, the response will still be very slow and it just may be too slow for Google. Consider using Google Search Console (webmaster tools) to keep an eye on these big sitemaps and see how many of their URLs get indexed.

Thank you very much for the reply,

Yeah I have set it to split the sitemaps monthly. So I am going to check the error logs.

But I wonder if there is any way that you add an option to split the sitemap files into custom numbers like 2K for example or store the files locally to speed things up.

Thank you again.

Caching is planned for a future release. I’ll consider an alternative split method but I cannot promise anything because the current plugin structure is designed to use WordPress internal features (yearly and monthly archives is one of them) as much as possible. Splitting by day would be easy but this will very likely cause the sitemap index to get too big.

Thank you.

Yeah you are right the daily option is not really logical.

I am afraid that the caching option would not be helpful in my case either since my files are not being loaded in the first place.

Anyways, I hope you come up with a solution for large websites like mine . This is the only plugin that I can use. Thank you again for your support.

Hi hbs, your /sitemap.xml is not from this plugin. You probably need to remove the static sitemap.xml file in your site root via FTP to get rid of it. Otherwise there is another sitemap plugin running.

This plugin’s sitemap can be seen on /?feed=sitemap where you’ll notice the portfolio post type is included. After removing the static one, it should become accessible via /sitemap.xml too…

 Download of the sitemap or feed failed

We encountered an issue when we tried to download this sitemap. Please check the sitemap for errors and resubmit the sitemap.

I tried to resubmit but still failed

Hi, I get a message that “no style is associated” with my sitemap and a basic tree view comes up under view…is this what I should see? When viewing the Google News section a “prettier” page is offered up.

Hey that was the issue, but I just uploaded your new update and can’t access my site, parsing error at ontheroadwithdave.com had to login under the wordpress.com site to contact you. Some kind of error with the upgrade
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘[‘ in D:\Hosting\2772443\html\wp-content\plugins\xml-sitemap-feed\includes\class-xmlsitemapfeed.php on line 703

Hi there, you got recommended by Irena Domingo (blog about sitemaps in multiple wp-languages).
I’ve tried your plugin, but don’t seem to get past the “save settings” on configuration page. Get this error:

Unhandled Exception

Message:
Only variables should be passed by reference

Location:
/home/forge/{clipped}/htdocs/content/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/includes/admin.php on line 752

Stack Trace:
#0 /home/forge/{clipped}/htdocs/content/mu-plugins/themosis-framework/bootstrap/start.php(175): Themosis\Error\Error::native(2048, ‘Only variables …’, ‘/home/forge/sta…’, 752)
#1 /home/forge/{clipped}/htdocs/content/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/includes/admin.php(752): THFWK_Themosis->{closure}(2048, ‘Only variables …’, ‘/home/forge/sta…’, 752, Array)
#2 [internal function]: XMLSF_Admin->sanitize_custom_sitemaps_settings(Array)
#3 /home/forge/{clipped}/htdocs/cms/wp-includes/plugin.php(235): call_user_func_array(Array, Array)
#4 /home/forge/{clipped}/htdocs/cms/wp-includes/formatting.php(3884): apply_filters(‘sanitize_option…’, Array, ‘xmlsf_custom_si…’, Array)
#5 /home/forge/{clipped}/htdocs/cms/wp-includes/option.php(410): sanitize_option(‘xmlsf_custom_si…’, Array)
#6 /home/forge/{clipped}/htdocs/cms/wp-includes/option.php(301): add_option(‘xmlsf_custom_si…’, Array, ”, ‘yes’)
#7 /home/forge/{clipped}/htdocs/cms/wp-admin/options.php(215): update_option(‘xmlsf_custom_si…’, ”)
#8 {main}

Our site is hosted in forge, its a wordpress 4.2 installation based on themosis and polylang. We have installed “XML Sitemap & Google News feeds” version 4.6.3 – but get this error and are not able (most important actually) to get “one XML sitemap url per language” – we think we need to feed Google with one url per language.
In polylang, we have chosen “The language is set from different domains” and entered 4 different domains (a Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish), but its only the Danish (main) that gets into the XML sitemap url.

Hope you can shed some light on this, whether its our themosis-framework, polylang config or forge hosting, that could cause this?

Hi Thomas, are you still getting the error with the latest version? if so, could you please send the full error text via the contact form? About the more pressing matter: you have actually found the only feature that this plugin is not compatible with. Or at least not compatible ‘out of the box’ because you can get around it… On Settings > Reading, there is a field that allows you to set “additionally allowed domains”. By default, the plugin filters out all URLs that it finds that do not belong the the site’s domain, but in your case, it filters out the secondary language domaines because it is unaware of their validity. Adding them to that field, will let all language URLs pass and fill your main sitemap with all languages.

The plugin was built to combine all languages instead of creating a sitemap per language. This should not be a problem for Google as long as you are the verified owner of all domains. You’ll need to get a Google Webmasters Tools account and add all domains there, passing validation, to make sure they will be accepted.

Thanks Previous and Greetings admin.
I have a question: all my news articles in section / news, no blog posts. But news sitemap just sucks in the post kind of articles.
An easy way to hack news sitemap plugin so that pipes in any news article?

Hi Molyeaja, there is the option “Include post types” in the Google News Sitemap section on your Settings > Reading admin page. Deselect “Posts” and select your “News” post type there.

Hi Javier, yes that is indeed terrible. I’ve never seen that happen before. Have you got any paging/navigation plugins running? I notice you’r using WPML, is that configured correctly? Does the number if homepages correspond with configured (but deactivated) languages maybe? The sitemap-home.xml should be showing each language homepage (/de/ /es/ /ru/ etc…) but instead it is showing /1/ /2/ /3/ etc… Do those numbers correspond with the language ID’s maybe?

Which WPML version (number) is installed on your site?

I also notice there are only english posts and pages in the other sitemaps. Not good either… Looks definitely like a conflict/problem with WPML 🙁

Hi, because you seem to be using two different WordPress installations, and your main sitemap index points to each site’s sitemap index. A sitemap index may not contain other sitemap indexes. From your root sitemap index, you need to point straight to each individual sitemap (posts/pages/taxonomies) that are in the sitemap indexes.

Hi Sandeep, your posts tag sitemap seems to encounter an error during creation. It might be because of the number of tags your site is using? If you have access to server error log, you might be able to find a related error that tells more about what is going wrong…

Hi,

In the past this has worked quite well. Now the test function goes go to a blank page. There is no code above it when inspected. I have refreshed the permalinks setting and still nothing. We’ve had hundreds of pages fall out of sitemaps and now receiving a message in Webmasters tools saying your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page.

Site: https://aecnewstoday.com

Thank you.

John

PS. Also doesn’t seem to do much of a job on getting our images indexed. We’ve got hundreds of images, but before this blank page error only had a few dozen indexed. They are all uploaded with alt text and descriptions.

Hi John, a blank page could mean the plugin is running into the PHP memory limit. You could try setting the option “Split by” to “Year” or “Month”.

About the images: a sitemap cannot force Google or Bing to index your images, it can only make the search engine aware of them. Keep an eye on your sitemap in your Webmaster Tools account. It will tell you how many images it has found in the sitemap and how many it has actually indexed. If there is anything wrong, you will be notified there too. But again, there is no way to force search engines to index anything. If they decide to ignore your site or penalize it for whatever reason, they can do so at their leisure.

I just update to 4.9.2 and it said it support ‘HTTPS schema URLs’.
While open my sitemap.xml and read the source code:

“`


“`
There, see? the siteindex.xsd is still HTTP, not HTTPS. That cause xml page doesn’t have styles when we visit it using HTTPS.
Although the XML still works, you should fix this bug.

Hi, the comment system ate your code so I cannot see your sitemap source but maybe you where looking at a cached version of your sitemap?

OK, I think I found the problem why my xml page doesn’t have styles.
While open the xml link, I found I got “Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8” which supposed to be text/xml.
I have no idea why it happened. Then I check your site and found you still using 4.8. I downgrade the plugin and , OK? Everything goes fine?
What’s the idea of new version?

The new version is running on this site. I have no idea why your sitemap header would start responding with the wrong content type. Could you upgrade again and share a link so I can see it live?

OK, thanks for the link. Apparently, the server does not automatically add the correct header based on the .xml extension. In version 4.8 and before the header was added on PHP level but removed in 4.9. I’ll push for a new point release where the header is back again.

This server can surely recognize .xml as text/xml. I have tried a file ‘test2.xml’ on this server and it worked fine. I have also check the MIME Types Setting and the .xml is rightly set to text/xml.

OK, I updated it to 4.9.3 and the header is right now.
Thanks for your working.

Hello,
First of all, thanks for this great plugin.

I have a problem with a post
It appears in the sitemap that I have attached 1458 images to the publication, but there are no more than 10 or 12.

This information is transmitted to Google Search Console and there may be a risk of penalty for my website

How I could fix this problem?

Hi Nacho, your comment was trapped in the spam filter, sorry. Hope I can still help you out 🙂 can you share a link to your sitemap?

Hi,

Thanks for the plugin.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work with my polylang setup. I have it set up with multiple domain names, a domain name for each language. Whenever I go to one of the domains /sitemap.xml, I always get the sitemap of the default language.

How can I fix this?

Hi Koen, the plugin has not been tested with Polylang on different domain names but in theory this should be done:
1. make sure you are the verified owner of each domain name in your Google and Bing Search Console Webmaster Tools accounts
2. go to Settings > XML Sitemap and find on the tab Advanced the Allowed domains field, add all alternative domains here to prevent them from being filtered out of the sitemap.

Now, all languages should appear in your sitemap. The sitemap on each language domain will contain all languages so you do not need to add each of them to Search Console, only the one on your main domain. As long as you are the verified owner of all other domains, the URLs will be accepted for indexing.

Hi dzair, you can also just remove the static robots.txt file and let WordPress take care of it dynamically. You can append rules on the Settings > Reading admin page in the robots.txt field.

Access your hosting space via FTP or the hosting panel, the static robots.txt file should be in your site root, along with the other root files like index.php and htaccess files and usual wordpress files and folders. Simply rename the existing robots.txt to robots.tmp (for safe-keeping) and test the address via your browser again https://www.dzairpress.com/robots.txt

Hi Robin, Google and Bing are automatically pinged upon each new publication but they cannot be forced to index your sitemap or site. You’ll just have to wait for them to do so. Yandex and Baido follow the XML_RPC standard which you can add to your WordPress Update Services list.

Hello — The newest update made the Google News Genre metabox disappear from the post edit screen. How can I restore this, or should I revert to an older version? If so, please send a link to an older version. Thx!

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