In my first weeks at Atlassian, I was seeking for a quick-win to get a stronger foothold within the company and evangelize SEO. So, I audited our main site and noticed it didn’t have an XML sitemap. What an easy win! I went to the devs and asked them to activate it in the CMS. To my surprise, they told me that it wasn’t possible; I was baffled. After some thinking, I remembered that Screaming Frog had an XML sitemap function, so I scraped the site and uploaded the crawl as an XML sitemap. Google ate it within a few seconds, and we saw a noticeable impact on our traffic in the following days. The moral of the story is that XML sitemaps are important and sometimes underrated. What XML Sitemaps Are and Why You Need to Have One XML sitemaps are digital maps that help Google discover important pages on your site and how often they are being updated. Google states on its help center page: A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site, and also … [Read more...] about The Best XML Sitemap Tools, Tips, and Tricks
Wordpress xml sitemap
Google Proposes Building XML Sitemaps Into WordPress Core
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
How to Optimize your XML Sitemap for Maximum SEO
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
What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one? • Yoast
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
The Importance Of XML Sitemaps In The Age Of Panda
In the early days of search engines, I wasn’t much of a believer in XML sitemaps. But over time, I began to see first hand how they can benefit websites. XML sitemaps serve as a way to communicate directly with the search engines, alerting them to new or changed content very quickly and helping to ensure that the content is indexed faster. For content publishers, it’s become critical to help Google specifically understand if your site is the original publisher of content. Why? Panda. Content Syndication, Duplicate Content & Panda It’s not uncommon for publishers to syndicate their content on other websites. Further, it’s also not uncommon for publishers to have their site’s content “curated” by other websites without a formal syndication agreement. Unfortunately, the definition of content curation is fuzzy at best. In a quick Google search for a recent Search Engine Land article, I found over 47 copies of the article on other sites. … [Read more...] about The Importance Of XML Sitemaps In The Age Of Panda