Jetpack xml sitemap

A good XML sitemap acts as a roadmap of your website which leads Google to all your important pages. XML sitemaps can be good for SEO, as they allow Google to quickly find your essential website pages, even if your internal linking isn’t perfect. This post explains what XML sitemaps are and how they help you rank better. What are XML sitemaps? You want Google to crawl every important page of your website, but sometimes pages end up without any internal links pointing to them, making them hard to find. An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all, and helping it understand your website structure: Yoast.com’s XML sitemap Above is Yoast.com’s XML sitemap, created by the Yoast SEO plugin and later on we’ll explain how our plugin helps you create the best XML sitemaps. If you’re not using our plugin, your XML sitemap may look a little different but will work the same way. As you can see, … [Read more...] about What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one? • Yoast

Google's Pascal Birchler, who has been with Google since this past January, but worked at WordPress since 2014 prior to that, published a new project where Google and WordPress want to integrate basic XML Sitemaps in WordPress Core and introduce an XML Sitemaps API to make it fully extendable.This will make it so WordPress has XML Sitemaps out of the box. Will this replace Yoast? No, in fact, it says "This post proposes integration of XML Sitemaps to WordPress Core as a feature project. The proposal was created as a collaboration between Yoast, Google and various contributors."XML Sitemaps will be enabled by default making the following content types indexableHomepage Posts page Core Post Types (Pages and Posts) Custom Post Types Core Taxonomies (Tags and Categories) Custom Taxonomies Users (Authors) Additionally, the robots.txt file exposed by WordPress will reference the sitemap index.Here is a diagram:Seems like John, Gary and friends are excited for this: Forum discussion at … [Read more...] about Google Proposes Building XML Sitemaps Into WordPress Core

by Alex Chris8 Comments When optimizing your website for SEO, one of your goals is to provide Google the right signals so that it can index your website better. An optimized XML sitemap is one of those signals that can lead to faster indexing and higher rankings.What is an XML Sitemap and why do you need it?In simple terms, an XML sitemap is a file that lists all important pages of your website that search engine crawlers should know about.Even if you don’t have a sitemap, they are still able to index your website but having a sitemap makes their job easier and also it gives you the opportunity to let them know about pages and parts of your website the may not discover easily.There are different kind of sitemaps, you can submit a sitemap for your posts, images and videos.When is a sitemap really important?For websites with many pages, a sitemap helps search engines discover pages that are new or updated.For websites that don’t use good internal linking practices a … [Read more...] about How to Optimize your XML Sitemap for Maximum SEO

Google's John Mueller confirmed on Twitter that Google may stop fetching your XML Sitemap files if the URLs within them are invalid. He said it is fine to have URLs that redirect but they should load content. If not, Google may simply start ignoring your Sitemaps.John said "We'd stop fetching sitemap files if the URLs are invalid, but if you're returning content or redirecting (which is kinda recommended), we'll keep trying them. It shouldn't cause problems, since overall sitemap files are only a tiny-tiny part of all URLs fetched from a site." So make sure the URLs in your XML Sitemap files for the most part return URLs that load content.Forum discussion at Twitter. … [Read more...] about Google May Ignore Your XML Sitemap If The URLs Are Invalid

You can now remove your XML Sitemaps from the new version of the Google Search Console. Pedro Dias first spotted this and posted about this on Twitter. You can go to your Sitemap report and click on a sitemap you want to remove, then the three dots to remove that sitemap.Here is Pedro's screen shot of this in action:I have confirmed that I can personally remove sitemap files in the new Google Search Console from properties I manage as well. So this feature is probably live for everyone.Forum discussion at Twitter. … [Read more...] about Google Search Console Now Allows Removal Of XML Sitemaps