Google (XML) Sitemap Generator Plugin Help

Maintenance of this plugin has been taken over by Auctollo. You can find all up-to-date information on their website. If you need support, please use the forums or contact the new maintainer. Thanks!

Welcome to the new help page of the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress. This help page is valid for the version 4 of the plugin and newer.

General Questions regarding XML Sitemaps

What is a Google Sitemap?

Basically, a Google Sitemap is a file which contains URLs and some additional information for all public pages or documents of your website. Google and other search engines can read this file and add the defined pages to their index.

How can I create Google Sitemap for my WordPress blog?

That is the major function of the Google Sitemap Plugin for WordPress. It is easy to install and will generate a sitemap containing all your WordPress content.

Will Google Sitemaps affect my ranking?

There are no evidences that a Google Sitemap will directly affect your ranking. However, it can help Google to index and crawl your page better which may result in a more complete index of your page.

Questions regarding the installation

How do I install the plugin?

Just install it like any other WordPress plugin. The easiest way is via the "Add plugin" function in WordPress. If that doesn't work for you, download it to your computer and upload it via FTP to your wp-content/plugins directory. You don't need to change anything in your webserver configuration, file permissions or upload any other files.

Do I need to change any settings?

The default settings are fine for most blogs. Feel free to change the priorities, change frequencies or what you want to include in your sitemap. If you ever need to reset the settings to their default values, click the button at the end of the settings page.

Settings explained

Update notification

  • Notify Google about updates of your Blog: This will ping Google every time you publish a new post or edit an old one.
  • Notify Bing about updates of your Blog: This will ping Bing every time you publish a new post or edit an old one.
  • Add sitemap URL to the virtual robots.txt file: If activated, the plugin will add the URL of your sitemap to your robots.txt file.

Advanced options

  • Try to increase the memory limit: This option should actually not be necessary anymore, but if you ever get an out-of-memory error while requesting your sitemap, you can try to increase the limit here.
  • Try to increase the execution time limit: Similar like the memory limit, but his one defined the maximum execution time.
  • Include a XSLT stylesheet: Normally an XML sitemap just looks like a XML document, which is hard to read by humans.
  • Override the base URL of the sitemap: Use this option if you want your sitemap to appear in the root of your domain in case WordPress is installed in a sub-directory. Please refer to this section of the help page for more information.
  • Include sitemap in HTML format: If activated, the plugin will also generate a sitemap in HTML format.
  • Allow anonymous statistics: This will send some anonymous statistics to the author of the plugin.

Additional pages

Here you can specify files or URLs which should be included in the sitemap, but do not belong to your Blog/WordPress.

Post priority

  • Do not use automatic priority calculation: All posts will have the same priority in your sitemap.
  • Comment Count: Uses the number of comments to calculate the priority of the posts.
  • Comment Average: Uses the number of comments to calculate the priority of the posts. The calculation base is the average number of comments per post.

Sitemap content

  • WordPress standard content: Check the items you want to include in your sitemap.
  • Custom taxonomies: Check all the custom taxonomies you would like to include.
  • Custom post types: Check all the custom post types you would like to include.
  • Include the last modification time: This will add the last modification date to all your entries in the sitemap.

Exclude items

  • Excluded categories: If you exclude a category here, no posts from this category will appear in your sitemap.
  • Exclude posts: Use this option to exclude specific posts from the sitemap.

Change frequencies / priorities

  • Change frequencies: With this settings you can give search engines a hint, how many times the content of your blog changes.
  • Priorities: With this settings you can give search engines a hint, how important the content of your blog is.

Other features

Move your sitemap to your domain root

If your Blog is located in a sub-directory (example.com/blog/) your sitemap will be generated under example.com/blog/sitemap.xml. If you want to move your sitemap to example.com/sitemap.xml, please enter "http://example.com/blog/" under "Override the base URL of the sitemap" at the plugin settings page and add the following rewrite rule to your .htaccess file under your domain root:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^sitemap(-+([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+))?\.xml(\.gz)?$ /your-blogdir/sitemap$1.xml$2 [L]
</IfModule>

Replace "your-blogdir" with the name of the sub-directory of your WordPress installation.

Common problems

Google Webmaster Tools shows 0 indexed pages

Sometimes you might experienced the issue, that Google Webmaster Tools shows some pages of the sitemap as "submitted", but not as "indexed". Please verify the following:

  • That you have verified the right website (http vs https, www vs non-www).
  • That your sitemap does not have any errors.
  • The statistic in Google Webmaster Tools are NOT realtime.

Google Webmaster Tools reports "Missing XML tag"

This usually happens if Google reads a sitemap without any content. Check the sitemap and see if there are any URLs inside.

Google Webmaster Tools reports "Invalid XML"

Please open your sitemap in your browser and chose "View Source". Is there a blank line or whitespace in front of the XML tag? That's the problem.

Google Webmaster Tools reports "Sitemap is in HTML format"

That happens from time to time and is an issue in Google Webmaster Tools. Try to resubmit your sitemap and wait.

Google Webmaster Tools reports "404 Not found" for the sitemap

  • Check your permalinks settings of WordPress and click the Save button there.
  • If you are using nginx as a webserver, please add the Rewrite Rules manually.

My Sitemap does not update

Are you sure about this? With version 4, the plugin uses a new format for the sitemap. Please read this article for details.

Other topics

My question is not answered here

If you have a problem with the plugin and is not handled here, you can visit the support forums. Please read this topic first before opening a new thread!

I've seen your name on website XYZ and have questions regarding the content.

With a 99.9% chance I am not affiliated with the website you are talking about. The website is probably using one of my WordPress plugins and you have found a note about that. Please try to find out the real website owner and don't contact me.