Google Sitemap Made Easy in WordPress

Posted on September 2, 2007
Filed Under WordPress Plugins, WordPress SEO |

Google Sitemap is a new protocol that allows a website to inform Google about web pages in the site that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL. Now this protocol is also supported by MSN, Yahoo, Ask, and more search engines.

For frequently updated websites like blog, Google Sitemap is a must-have in order for search engines to index your site more intelligently.

Creating a XML sitemap used to be a challenging task even with help of some tools. For WordPress, it is so easy, — a plugin does it all. This very popular plugin is Google Sitemap Generator by Arne Brachhold.

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Setting up Google Sitemap Generator is very easy. Detailed instructions are provided. There are many configuration options, but you can use the default setup. At the first time, click “Rebuild Sitemap” button to generate XML file sitemap.xml and zipped file sitemap.xml.gz in the root directory . The site map XML will be updated automatically when there is a change such as a new posting in the website.

If you get error message like
“Could not write into /home/altbase/public_html/itcareersuccess/sitemap.xml”
That means you don’t have write privilege. To fix it, create 2 empty text files named sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz in the root directory, and then set CHMOD permission to 777.

If the “Rebuild Sitemap” is successful, you get message like:

Successfully built sitemap file:
- URL: http://www.wordpressprofit.com/sitemap.xml
- Path: /home/public_html/wordpressprofit/sitemap.xml

Successfully built gzipped sitemap file:
- URL: http://www.wordpressprofit.com/sitemap.xml.gz
- Path: /home/public_html/wordpressprofit/sitemap.xml.gz

Successfully pinged Google at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wordpressprofit.com%2Fsitemap.xml.gz

You may still want to manually add your sitemap XML to Google at:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

Keep in mind that you don’t need to do anything once you setup this plugin. It runs on automatic mode, — When you edit/publish/delete a post, your sitemap gets regenerated and Google search engine get pinged!

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