Creating a WordPress sitemap. Creating an XML Sitemap File for a WordPress Blog (Plugin)

If you have installed the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for your WordPress site and want to understand more about its installation, configuration and use, then this article will help you find answers to frequently asked questions.

Google XML Sitemaps is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress sites, for this reason many users have certain questions regarding the use of the plugin. Let's look at everything in order.

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General questions regarding XML Sitemaps

• What is Google Sitemap? Basically, Google Sitemap is a file that contains URLs and additional information for all pages or documents on your site. Google and other search engines can read this file and add certain pages to their index.
• How can I create a Google Sitemap for my WordPress blog? This is the main feature of the Google Sitemap plugin for WordPress. It is easy to install and will generate a sitemap containing all the pages of a WordPress site.
• How will Google Sitemap affect my rankings and rankings? There is no evidence that Google Sitemaps directly affect site rankings. However, a map can help Google index and crawl your pages better and faster. All this will inevitably lead to more complete indexing of pages.

Questions regarding installing Google XML Sitemaps

• How to install the plugin? Just install it like any other WordPress plugin. The easiest way to install a sitemap is to use the “Add Plugin” feature in WordPress. Read about this separately.

  If this function is not available for some reason, you can download it to your computer and upload it to your server. You don't need to change anything in the web server configuration, file permissions or upload any other files.

• Do I need to change any settings? The default settings are suitable for most blogs. Don't be afraid to change the priorities, frequency of changes, or content of the sitemap. If you ever need to reset your settings to default, click the button at the end of the settings page.

Google XML Sitemaps Settings Overview

Notifications about updates on the site - setting up Google XML Sitemaps:

• Google notification about new blog items: This is a Google notification setting that will trigger every time you publish a new post or edit an old one. Google will receive a sitemap, which may subsequently speed up the indexing of your new post in the shortest possible time.
• Notify Bing about blog updates: These are Bing notification settings. Since Yahoo is powered by Bing, your posts should also appear on Yahoo soon.
• Adding a URL sitemap to: If you enable the plugin to add your sitemap URL in your robots.txt file, this will allow search engines that do not support notifications, such as Baidu or Yandex, to find your sitemap. The sitemap is generated by WordPress, so make sure the robots.txt file is saved in your blog folder!

Look Google settings XML Sitemaps something like this:

Advanced options:

• Try increasing the amount of memory. This option should generally not be needed in most cases, but if you ever get a memory error when requesting a sitemap, you can try increasing the limit here.
• Include XSLT styles: Typically an XML sitemap looks like an XML document that is difficult for humans to read. The plugin comes with a special style that makes it more readable. Just use the default plugin to use the style, or enter the full URL to your own if that's what you want to use. Please make sure it is in the same directory!
• Move Sitemap Base URL: Use this option if you want the sitemap to appear in the root directory of your domain if WordPress is installed in a subdirectory.
• Include sitemap in HTML format: If this option is activated, the plugin will also generate a sitemap in HTML format. This can be useful for bots that don't understand the XML standard.
• Allow anonymous statistics: This option will allow you to send some anonymous information to the plugin author. The following data will be sent by the plugin: WordPress version, PHP versions, language, number of posts on your blog (in steps of 50) and a unique string to avoid duplicates. Why is this necessary? The author can optimize the plugin for the most commonly used WordPress/PHP versions and improve translations for the most common languages. The plugin will never send anything personal, such as your blog URL, title, name or email address.

Additional pages:

• Here you can specify files or URLs that should be included in the sitemap, but do not belong to your blog. For example, if your domain is www.foo.com and your blog is at www.foo.com/blog you can include your page at www.foo.com
  Note: If your blog is in a subdirectory and you want to add pages that are not in the blog or sub directory, you must place the sitemap file in the root directory.

Page priority messages:

• Do not use automatic priority calculation: All messages will have the same priority on the site. It can be determined according to the "Priorities" function.
• Comment graphs: Uses the number of comments to calculate the priority of posts.
• Average comment: Uses the number of comments to calculate the priority of posts. Base calculation - average number of comments per post.

Sitemap contents:

• WordPress standard content: Check the items you want to include in your sitemap.
• Custom taxonomies: Review any custom taxonomies you would like to include.
• Include last modification time: This will add the last modified date to all of your map entries. Search engines can use this information to return to the page again if it has changed. It is highly recommended that this option be enabled.

Exclude items:

• Excluding categories: If you exclude a category here, entries from that category will not appear in the xml file.
• Exclude entries: Use this option to exclude specific site entries. You must enter a post ID. Separate messages by comma. can be found in a special article.

Change frequency/priorities:

• Change frequencies: With this setting, you can give search engines a hint about how often the content of your pages changes.
• Priorities: With this setting you can give search engines a hint how important the content of your blog is . This value is always assigned in relation to all other pages on your blog, so set all values ​​to avoid high values ​​(= 1.0), which don't make any sense.

Other Features of Google XML Sitemaps

Directing the sitemap to the root domain:

If your blog is in a sub-directory (example.com/blog/~~pobj) the sitemap will be generated at example.com/blog/sitemap.xml~~pobj. If you want to move the site to example.com/sitemap.xml, please enter "http://example.com/blog/" under "Override Base URL from Sitemap file" on the plugin settings page and add the following rule to the .htaccess file under the root domain:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^ (sitemaps - + ( +))?.? \XML(.\GZ)$/your-blogdir/sitemap$1.xml$2 [L]

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

Common Google XML Sitemaps Problems and Errors

Google Webmaster Tools shows information about indexed pages:

Sometimes you may have problems with , which shows multiple sitemap pages in "view" but not as "indexable". Or perhaps the number of indexed pages will be less than the number of urls sent. We recommend that you check the following:

• Check if the site URL is correct. Google distinguishes between HTTP/HTTPS, WWW/non-WWW, root/subfolder. So if you blog on http://www.blog.com/ make sure you add http://www.blog.com/ to Google Webmaster Tools, and http://www.blog.com/ sitemap.xml site map.
• Sitemaps have no errors, but the sitemap may contain warnings, for example if your site loaded slowly when Google tried to crawl it.
• If your sitemap contains links to pages that are not accessible, try searching for them in WordPress. The plugin reads all posts that are published and do not have passwords. If something appears in your sitemap, it means it is in your WordPress database.
• Statistics in Google Webmaster Tools, are not real-time data. They are for informational purposes only. Use the "site:" operator in Google search to find which pages on your blog are actually currently being indexed. It can take hours or even days for data to hit Google Webmaster until new URLs show up as indexed, but are actually already included in search results.

Google Webmaster Tools: “Missing XML Tags” reports.

This usually happens when Google reads a sitemap without any content. Check the sitemap and see if there are any URLs inside. If not, please try the following:

• If externals.xml is the problem. Have you added any external pages? If so, please check that the URL for each is correct. Also make sure there is no empty line in the "Additional Pages" section of the plugin settings page. Also try saving all your settings again using the "Update Settings" button at the end of the page.
• If the sitemap problem is archives.xml. If you don't have any posts (pages only), you can disable "Enable Archives" to resolve this issue.

Google Webmaster Tools says "Invalid XML" or the browser says error on line X-X in column 6.

An XML declaration is only allowed at the beginning of a document. Please open the sitemap in your browser and select "Source Code". Is there a blank line or spaces before the XML tag? This is a problem. Your RSS feeds may also be down. What is RSS? The cause of this problem is a new line or spaces in another plugin or your theme's functions.php file. Make sure your functions.php file ends with ?> and there are no blank lines or spaces after it. If this doesn't work, try disabling other plugins one by one to find the malicious one.

Google Webmaster Tools, “404 Not Found” report for sitemap.

• Check your WordPress permanent settings and click the “Save” button.
• If you are using Nginx as your web server, please add rewrite rules manually. They should be presented on the Plugins page of the settings.
• If you are using W3 Total Cache and have the "Don't handle 404 errors for static objects with WordPress" feature enabled under Browser Cache, please add the rules below so that "404 errors are included in the exception list":
  * sitemaps [a-z0-9_\-] * \ (XML | XSL | HTML). (.\GZ)?
  New versions of W3 Total Cache (> 0.9.4) already include fixes.

My XML Sitemap is not updating

Are you sure about this? Since version 4, the plugin uses a new format for the site. The main sitemap (sitemap.xml) only has one entry per month for posts. Click the current month you can see the actual posts. You will probably find your new publication there too.

In general, the settings for Google XML Sitemaps are quite simple, but the plugin, by its intended purpose, plays a huge role when working with search engines. Ignoring the creation of an XML map may negatively affect the promotion of the site in the future.

There’s just one problem: there shouldn’t be any unnecessary links among the links to the site’s pages. For example, when uploading images to WordPress using the admin panel ( Vertical menu admin panel → Media files) separate pages for each image appear on the site. The strange function of the engine leads to the danger of links to these pages, which are completely unnecessary for the search robot, ending up in the site map.

This will happen if you do not use the trustworthy Google XML Sitemaps to build a sitemap, but the possibility of the new version of All in One Seo Pack. In Fig. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of a site map built by the All in One Seo Pack plugin.

Building a sitemap using the All in One Seo Pack plugin

Rice. 1. Sitemap built with the All in One Seo Pack plugin. Links to pages with images that are not needed in the index are highlighted in red.

The search robot will follow the links in the site map and index pages that you don’t even know about. Moreover, if the administrator actively uses the function of adding pictures through the admin panel, there will be a lot of these harmful links.

The sitemap building function in the All in One Seo Pack plugin is activated and deactivated in the plugin settings menu in the “Other modules” list (see Fig. 2).

Rice. 2. Activation and deactivation of sitemap building using the All in One Seo Pack plugin.

Not only that, if for some reason the sitemap building in All in One Seo Pack was once activated, you will face the following problem. After deactivating the harmful function, the link to the site map (yourdomain.ru/sitemap.xml) will open the main page (see Fig. 3). In this case, the main page will open for this address even after installing the normal Google XML Sitemaps plugin. Installation only old version Google XML Sitemaps 3.x, which physically creates sitemap files on the server, will solve the problem. But more on that later.

Rice. 3. Home page to the sitemap address as a result of the All in One Seo Pack.

Google XML Sitemaps

I think it’s already clear that you don’t need to use the All in One Seo Pack feature to build a sitemap. Why are there urges to use a different sitemap, rather than the one built by Google XML Sitemaps, which at some point became a standard?

It's all about the update, which changed the usual appearance of sitemap.xml. Previously, before version 4, Google XML Sitemaps built a map like the one in Fig. 4. After updating to the fourth version, the site map has changed (see Fig. 5).

Rice. 4. Site map built by the Google XML Sitemaps plugin version 3.x.

Rice. 5. Sitemap built new Google version XML Sitemaps 4.x.

Such a dramatic change is scary for newbies. But, if you read the explanation about this on the developer’s website page, it becomes clear that new map more correct and meets the standards. In addition, the official Google blog also uses a map of a new type.

But if no persuasion from the developer forces you to accept new look site maps - and be happy.

Google XML Sitemaps update problem

As I noticed, many webmasters, when updating Google XML Sitemaps, are missing an important thing. The fact is that the new version 4.x does not put the physical sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz file at the root of your site. Instead, it builds a virtual map that opens when you click on the link vashdomen.ru/sitemap.xml. Sometimes, because incorrect settings permissions, the updated plugin cannot remove unnecessary sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz. In this case, in the admin panel, on the plugin management page, the message marked in Fig. 6.

Rice. 6. A message on the Google XML Sitemaps plugin settings page after the update, which suggests manually deleting the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files.

What happens if the files are not deleted? It will be sad. Look at fig. 4 and 7. In the site map in Fig. 4 there is no link to the publication with the address “new-post-2”, while the entry on the site has been published. If we delete the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files manually, as we are asked to do in Fig. 6, the problem will be solved and we will see the previously lost publication (see Fig. 7).

Rice. 7. New version The sitemap displays more links than the old one.

Hence the moral. Be careful :)

Hello everyone, dear friends, long time no see. I hope everyone missed you and is looking forward to new articles.

The holidays are finally over, the barbecue is no longer available, and therefore it’s time to pull yourself together and work productively. As promised in the last article, we will again talk about the site map, only a little different.

Let's talk about how to make a map sitemap.xml for WordPress

So, according to our plan, we will figure out what an xml sitemap or sitemap.xml for WordPress is, why it is needed, how to organize it on our website, and how to inform the PS that we have a map.

What is an xml sitemap

A sitemap in xml format is a file called sitemap.xml which contains information about all the articles on your blog that are subject to indexing.

To be more precise, this file contains the full addresses of articles and pages of the site, as well as various metadata such as the date of last modification, frequency of changes, etc.

This file can be made either manually or using certain plugins, which is very convenient. Convenient because this file will be updated automatically. That is, it will always contain fresh and relevant information about your content. The article was written, published, and before you could blink an eye, it was already in the sitemap, just like that.

In principle, in order not to clutter your blog with various plugins, you can use online services. The most popular is //www.sitemapgenerator.ru.

But here it should be taken into account that with each new article, sitemap.xml you will need to generate and copy to the hosting again and again.

Who is interested in a review of this service, write in the comments, I will make a separate article.

Why do you need an xml sitemap?

Why all this shamanic voodoo with cards, you ask. Write better articles for yourself, work harder and you will be happy. But no, they came up with some cards here...

Yes, friends, this world is becoming more complicated, there’s no escape. Therefore, in order to constantly be in trend, you have to constantly study. As the great Lenin bequeathed.

In general, this whole business with maps became relevant after the CMS craze. As everyone knows, this is a content management system.

And what is she? Come on, let's push ourselves. Aaaand, that's right! A large number of different files, which for the most part have nothing to do with the content.

But bad luck, the work will come and stick its omnipresent nose into all the holes in search of something else for it to index.

And as you know, robots are stupid animals. And until you clearly tell it where it can and cannot go, where there is content and where it is not, it will index everything, what is needed and what is not, indiscriminately.

So, it is precisely for such stupid creatures that a site map is created, where it is clearly stated that there is content.

That is, the robot came like a bloodhound, sniffed the map, took the trail and quickly ran through the articles.

Essentially, we rubbed his nose into the content. But no one forbade him from indexing everything except content. Because the file is responsible for solving this problem robots.txt. And we will talk about it in another material, so subscribe to updates so as not to miss it

Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

Well, we've sorted out the theory, let's move on to practice. According to the plan, our organization, which has already set teeth on edge, has maps on its website.

As they say, nothing is simpler; to do this you will have to install a small plugin, the name of which you can see above. The plugin is very popular. More than a million installations, just for a minute, so install and don’t be afraid of anything.

So, we installed, activated, saw a new subsection in the console in the “Settings” section "XML Sitemap" and that’s it, you don’t need to configure anything, everything will work just like that.

Now if we type in the address bar of the browser //site address/sitemap.xml a page will open with information about the content structure of the blog. Headings, pages, articles, all this can be seen and found out when they were last updated.

Great, half the job is done! Why is it only half the battle, you ask? Because we need to notify our dear search engines that we have a sitemap. Remember what you told me about robots? You always have to show and tell them everything.

This is quite a big topic, so I can’t tell you everything in detail within the framework of this article. I will only say that first of all you will need to register with Yandex Webmaster and a similar service from Google - Tools for Webmasters.

Immediately add them to your bookmarks, desktop, panel quick start etc., because you will have to use them quite often.

The site map, or rather the address at which it is located, is added in the first case in the section "Indexing setup", and in the second to the section "Scanning" .

That’s all for today; in the next article we’ll talk about these services in more detail.

Sitemap is a site map. It comes in two various types: for people; for search engines. Previously, we reviewed a plugin for WordPress, which automatically creates a sitemap for users. Today we’ll look at plugins for creating Sitemap files for search engines.

Sitemap files contain information about the website pages that need to be indexed. By placing such a file on hosting in the directory of our website, we make it clear search engine Yandex:

• How often is information in posts and pages of the site updated?
• which pages or posts need to be indexed;
• what indexing priority do pages have?

sitemap xml

The Yandex search engine supports several Sitemap file formats:

1. XML format;
2. Compressed file in XML format;
3. A text file that contains only the full URLs of pages, each URL must be on a separate line.

Yandex developers recommend using the first format, as it provides the webmaster with the opportunity to indicate the frequency of changes to a post or page, set the relative priority of indexing, and also indicate the date when the page or post was last edited. These parameters are called changefreq, priority and lastmod respectively - you can specify 1, 2 or all 3.

Check sitemap

To check the correctness of the Sitemap, you can use a special validator. It is located at: http://webmaster.yandex.ru/sitemaptest.xml. You can check in several ways:

The sitemap.xml file itself must be located in the root directory of the domain for which it was compiled. That is, you cannot describe pages of other domains or subdomains in this file. The file name itself can be absolutely anything, for example karta.xml.

The total number of URLs should not exceed 50 thousand, and the compressed size should not exceed 10 Megabytes. If the number of URLs or weight is exceeded, it is allowed to split one large file into several acceptable ones.

Acceptable encoding is UTF-8. For Cyrillic domains and addresses, such as site.rf, it is not necessary to use Punycode conversion. The Yandex search robot perfectly recognizes original Cyrillic addresses in any form.

Sitemap for Yandex

There are two ways to indicate to a search engine the presence of a Sitemap file:

How to create a sitemap file?

There are several options for solving this problem:

• use sitemap generators - the downside is that you have to generate them every time new file when new information is added to the site and additional load occurs when such services access the site server. In addition, among the many tested ones, it was not possible to find a correct sitemap generator.
• create with your brain, with the help of your hands - the same disadvantages as the previous option, but you can do everything better and according to the “regulations”. However, this method is not for the lazy;
• using plugins is the most best option! Just find and choose for real good plugin to create a Sitemap.xml file is not easy.

Let's use the last option - it is optimal in terms of quality and labor costs.

google xml sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps is a good plugin, but it generates a completely clumsy map. Except possible errors, links to the developer and other unnecessary information are built into the map itself. It’s very simple to check what has been said - install, activate and configure the google xml sitemaps plugin, and then see what happens. Nothing good, let's move on.

All in SEO Pack

This is the best option out of all the ones we looked at. Itself, however it has additional modules (in the latest versions). After installation, an additional tab appears in the site management console - “SEO Tools”, consisting of “Main” and “Other Modules”:

Click the “Activate” button to activate the site map. After this, another “XML sitemap” link appears in SEO tools:

The only thing is that every time after adding a post or page, you will need to click on the “Update sitemap” button.

The settings are simple:

The rest of the settings are simpler - you'll figure it out. After creating the map, open it and look - there are no unnecessary links in the sitemap, everything is clean and neat, which is what we needed. Ready!

Use this plugin to greatly improve SEO to create special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.

With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

Supported since over 9 years and rated as the best WordPress plugin, it will do exactly what it’s supposed to do - providing a complete XML sitemap for search engines. It will not break your site, slow it down or annoy you. Guaranteed!

If you like the plugin, feel free to rate it (on the right side of this page)! 🙂

Screenshots

Frequently Asked Questions

It is under Settings > XML Sitemap. I know nowadays many plugins add top-level menu items, but in most of the cases it is just not necessary. I’ve seen WP installations which looked like an Internet Explorer ten years ago with 20 toolbars installed. 😉

Do I have to create a sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz by myself?

Not anymore. Since version 4, these files are dynamically generated. There must be no sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz in your site directory anymore! The plugin will try to rename them to sitemap.xml.bak if they still exist.

Does this plugin use static files or “I can’t find the sitemap.xml file!”

Not anymore. Since version 4, these files are dynamically generated just like any other WordPress content.

There are no comments yet (or I’ve disabled them) and all my postings have a priority of zero!

Please disable automatic priority calculation and define a static priority for posts.

So many configuration options… Do I need to change them?

No, only if you want to. Default values ​​are ok for most sites.

Does this plugin work with all WordPress versions?

This version works with WordPress 3.3 and better. If you’re using an older version, please check the Google Sitemaps Plugin Homepage for the legacy releases. There is a working release for every WordPress version since 1.5, but you really should consider updating your WordPress installation!

My question isn’t answered here My question isn’t even answered there Why is the changelog on a separate page and not here?

The WordPress.org repository is just another place to download this plugin. I don’t want to maintain too many pages with the same content. Thank you for your understanding!

Reviews

I love the simplicity of this plugin and it does what it"s supposed to do. But there are issues that needs to be addressed. Especially regarding compatibility with WPML. But here is why I give one star. The support is the worst I seen with a plugin. The developer/s doesn't seem to care at all as there are support threads all over the place that are really old and no replies. Have waited myself for several weeks and no response... If the support get their act together then I will change my review. But until then, stay away.

My favorite sitemap plugin. i regularly chose this plugin instead of yoast sitemaps as there is a single highly configurable sitemap delivered without a bunch of sitemaps for unused post-types etc. The settings are not to many but really powerful. Set up in a couple of minutes and perfect for almost every project.

Participants and developers

Google XML Sitemaps is an open source project source code. The following contributors contributed to the development of the plugin:

Change log

4.1.0 (2018-12-18)

• Fixed security issue related to escaping external URLs
• Fixed security issue related to option tags in forms

4.0.9 (2017-07-24)

• Fixed security issue related to donation functionality.

4.0.8 (2014-11-15)

• Fixed bug regarding the exclude categories feature, thanks to Claus Schöffel!

4.0.7.1 (2014-09-02)

• Sorry, no new features this time… This release only updates the Compatibility-Tag to WordPress 4.0. Unfortunately there is no way to do this anymore without a new version

4.0.7 (2014-06-23)

• Better compatibility with GoDaddy managed WP hosting
• Better compatibility with QuickCache
• Removed WordPress version from the sitemap
• Corrected link to WordPress privacy settings (if search engines are blocked)
• Changed hook which is being used for sitemap pings to avoid pings on draft edit

4.0.6 (2014-06-03)

• Added option to disable automatic gzipping
• Fixed bug with duplicated external sitemap entries
• Don’t gzip if behind Varnish since Varnish can do that

4.0.5 (2014-05-18)

• Added function to manually start ping for main-sitemap or all sub-sitemaps
• Added support for changing the base of the sitemap URL to another URL (for WP installations in sub-folders)
• Fixed issue with empty post sitemaps (related to GMT/local time offset)
• Fixed some timing issues in archives
• Improved check for possible problems before gzipping
• Fixed empty archives and author sitemaps in case there were no posts
• Fixed bug which caused the Priority Provider to disappear in recent PHP versions
• Plugin will also ping with the corresponding sub-sitemap in case a post was modified
• Better checking for empty external urls
• Changed text in XSL template to be more clear about sitemap-index and sub-sitemaps
• Changed content type to text/xml to improve compatibility with caching plugins
• Changed query parameters to is_feed=true to improve compatibility with caching plugins
• Switched from using WP_Query to load posts to a custom SQL statement to avoid problems with other plugin filters
• Added caching of some SQL statements
• Added support feed for more help topics
• Added link to new help page
• Cleaned up code and renamed variables to be more readable
• Updated Japanese Translation, thanks to Daisuke Takahashi

4.0.4 (2014-04-19)

• Removed deprecated get_page call
• Changed last modification time of sub-sitemaps to the last modification date of the posts instead of the publish date
• Removed information window if the statistic option has not been activated
• Added link regarding new sitemap format
• Updated Portuguese translation, thanks to Pedro Martinho
• Updated German translation

4.0.3 (2014-04-13)

• Fixed compression if an gzlib handler was already active
• Help regarding permalinks for Nginx users
• Fix with gzip compression in case there was other output before already
• Return 404 for HTML sitemaps if the option has been disabled
• Updated translations

4.0.2 (2014-04-01)

• Fixed warning if an gzip handler is already active

4.0.1 (2014-03-31)

• Fixed bug with custom post types including a “-“
• Fixed some 404 Not Found Errors

4.0 (2014-03-30)

• No static files anymore, sitemap is created on the fly!
• Sitemap is split-up into sub-sitemaps by month, allowing up to 50.000 posts per month! More information
• Support for custom post types and custom taxonomis!
• 100% Multisite compatible, including by-blog and network activation.
• Reduced server resource usage due to less content per request.
• New API allows other plugins to add their own, separate sitemaps.
• Note: PHP 5.1 and WordPress 3.3 is required! The plugin will not work with lower versions!
• Note: This version will try to rename your old sitemap files to *-old.xml. If that doesn’t work, please delete them manually since no static files are needed anymore!

3.4.1 (2014-04-10)

• Compatibility with mysqli

Version 3.4 (2013-11-24)

• Fixed deprecation warnings in PHP 5.4, thanks to Dion Hulse!

3.3 (2013-09-28)

• Fixed problem with file permission checking
• Filter out hashs (#) in URLs

3.2.9 (2013-01-11)

• Fixed security issue with change frequencies and filename of sitemap file. Exploit was only possible with admin account.

3.2.8 (2012-08-08)

• Fixed wrong custom taxonomy URLs, thanks to ramon fincken of the wordpress.org forum!
• Removed ASK ping since they shut down their service.
• Exclude post_format taxonomy from custom taxonomy list

3.2.7 (2012-04-24)

• Fixed custom post types, thanks to clearsite of the wordpress.org forum!
• Fixed broken admin layout on WP 3.4

3.2.6 (2011-09-19)

• Removed YAHOO ping since YAHOO uses bing now
• Removed deprecated function call

3.2.5 (2011-07-11)

• Backported Bing ping success fix from beta
• Added friendly hint to try out the new beta

3.2.4 (2010-05-29)

• Added (GMT) to date column in sitemap xslt template to avoid confusion with different time zones
• Fixed wrong SQL statement for author pages, thanks to twoenoug
• Fixed several deprecated function calls
• Note: This release does not support the new multisite feature of WordPress yet and will not be active when multisite is enabled.

3.2.3 (2010-04-02)

• Fixed that all pages were missing in the sitemap if the “Uncategorized” category was excluded

3.2.2 (2009-12-19)

• Updated compatibility tag for WordPress 2.9
• Fixed PHP4 problems

3.2.1 (2009-12-16)

• Notes and update messages at the top of the admin page could interfere with the manual build function
• Help links in the WP contextual help were not shown anymore since the last update
• IE 7 sometimes displayed a cached admin page
• Removed invalid link to config page from the plugin description (The link lead to a “Not enough permission error”)
• Improved performance of getting the current plugin version by caching
• Updated Spanish language files

3.2 (2009-11-23)

• Added function to show the actual results of a ping instead of only linking to the url
• Added new hook (sm_rebuild) for third party plugins to start building the sitemap
• Fixed bug which showed the wrong URL for the latest Google ping result
• Added some missing documentation
• Removed hardcoded php name for sitemap file in admin urls
• Uses KSES for showing ping test results
• Ping test fixed for WP< 2.3

3.1.9 (2009-11-13)

• Fixed MySQL Error if author pages were included

3.1.8 (2009-11-07)

• Improved custom taxonomy handling and fixed wrong last modification date
• Fixed fatal error in WordPress versions lower than 2.3
• Fixed Update Notice for WordPress 2.8 and higher
• Added warning if blog privacy is activated
• Fixed priorities of additional pages were shown as 0 instead of 1

3.1.7 (2009-10-21)

• Added support for custom taxonomies. Thanks to Lee!

3.1.6 (2009-08-31)

• Fixed PHP error “Only variables can be passed by reference”
• Fixed wrong URLS of multi-page posts (Thanks artstorm!)
• Updated many language files

3.1.5 (2009-08-24)

• Added option to completely disable the last modification time
• Fixed problem with HTTPS url for the XSL stylesheet if the sitemap was built via the admin panel
• Improved handling of homepage entry if a single page was set for it
• Fixed mktime warning which appeared sometimes
• Fixed bug which caused inf. reloads after rebuilding the sitemap via the admin panel
• Improved handling of missing sitemaps files if WP was moved to another location

3.1.4 (2009-06-22)

• Fixed bug which broke all pings in WP older than 2.7
• Added more output in debug mode if pings fail
• Moved global post variable so other plugins can use it in get_permalink()
• Added small icon for ozh admin menu
• Added more help links in UI

3.1.3 (2009-06-07)

• Changed MSN Live Search to Bing
• Exclude categories also now exludes the category itself and not only the posts
• Pings now use the new WordPress HTTP API instead of Snoopy
• Fixed bug that in localized WP installations priorities could not be saved
• The sitemap cron job is now cleared after a manual rebuild or after changing the config
• Adjusted style of admin area for WP 2.8 and refreshed icons
• Disabled the “Exclude categories” feature for WP 2.5.1, since it doesn’t have the required functions yet

3.1.2 (2008-12-26)

• Changed the way the stylesheet is saved (default / custom stylesheet)
• Sitemap is now rebuild when a page is published
• Removed support for static robots.txt files, this is now handled via WordPress functions
• Added compat. exceptions for WP 2.0 and WP 2.1

3.1.1 (2008-12-21)

• Fixed redirect issue if wp-admin is rewritten via mod_rewrite, thanks to macjoost
• Fixed wrong path to assets, thanks PozHonks
• Fixed wrong plugin URL if wp-content was renamed / redirected, thanks to wnorris
• Updated WP User Interface for 2.7
• Various other small things

3.1.0.1 (2008-05-27)

• Extracted UI JS to external file
• Enabled the option to include following pages of multi-page posts
• Script tries to raise memory and time limit if active

3.1 (2008-05-22)

• Marked as stable

3.1b3 (2008-05-19)

• Cleaned up plugin directory and moved img files to subfolders
• Fixed background building bug in WP 2.1
• Removed auto-update plugin link for WP< 2.5

3.1b2 (2008-05-18)

• Fixed critical bug with the build in background option
• Added notification if a build is scheduled

3.1b1 (2008-05-08)

• Splitted plugin in loader, generator and user interface to save memory
• Generator and UI will only be loaded when needed
• Secured all admin actions with nonces
• Improved WP 2.5 handling
• New “Suggest a Feature” link

3.0.3.3 (2008-04-29)

• Fixed author pages
• Enhanced background building and increased delay to 15 seconds
• Enabled background building by default

3.0.3.2 (2008-04-28)

• Improved WP 2.5 handling (fixes blank screens and timeouts)

3.0.3.1 (2008-03-30)

• Added compatibility CSS for WP 2.5

3.0.3 (2007-12-30)

• Added option to ping MSN Live Search
• Removed some WordPress hooks (the sitemap isn’t updates with every comment anymore)

3.0.2.1 (2007-11-28)

• Fixed wrong XML Schema Location (Thanks to Emanuele Tessore)
• Added Russian Language files by Sergey http://ryvkin.ru

3.0.2 (2007-11-25)

• Fixed bug which caused that some settings were not saved correctly
• Added option to exclude pages or post by ID
• Restored YAHOO ping service with API key since the other one is to unreliable

3.0.1 (2007-11-03)

• Changed HTTP client for ping requests to Snoopy
• Added “safemode” for SQL which doesn’t use unbuffered results
• Added option to run the building process in background using wp-cron
• Added links to test the ping if it failed

3.0 final (2007-09-24)

• Marked as stable
• Removed useless functions

3.0b11 (2007-09-23)

• Changed mysql queries to unbuffered queries
• Uses MUCH less memory
• Option to limit the number of posts

3.0b10 (2007-09-04)

• Added category support for WordPress 2.3
• Fixed bug with empty URLs in sitemap
• Repaired GET building

3.0b9 (2007-09-02)

• Added tag support for WordPress 2.3
• Fixed archive bug with static pages (Thanks to Peter Claus Lamprecht)
• Fixed some missing translation strings, thanks to Kirin Lin

3.0b8 (2007-07-22)

• Fixed bug with empty categories
• Fixed bug with translation plugins
• Added support for robots.txt
• Switched YAHOO ping API from YAHOO Web Services to the “normal” ping service
• Search engines will only be pinged if the sitemap file has changed

3.0b7 (2007-05-17)

• Added Ask.com notification
• Added option to include the author pages like /author/john
• Fixed WP 2.1 / Pre 2.1 post / pages database changes
• Added check to not build the sitemap if importing posts
• Fixed wrong XSLT location (Thanks froosh)
• Small enhancements and bug fixes

3.0b6 (2007-01-23)

• sitemap.xml.gz was not compressed
• YAHOO update-notification was PHP5 only (Thanks to Joseph Abboud!)
• More WP 2.1 optimizations
• Reduced memory usage with PHP5

3.0b5 (2007-01-19)

• WordPress 2 Design
• YAHOO update notification
• New status report, removed ugly logfiles
• Added option to define a XSLT stylesheet and added a default one
• Fixed bug with sub-pages, thanks to Mike , Peter and Glenn
• Improved file handling, thanks to VJTD3
• WP 2.1 improvements

3.0b4 (2006-11-16)

• Fixed some smaller bugs
• Decreased memory usage which should solve timeout and memory problems
• Updated namespace to support YAHOO and MSN

3.0b2 (2006-01-14)

• Fixed several bugs reported by users

3.0b (2005-11-25)

• WordPress 2.0 (Beta, RC1) compatible
• Added different priority calculation modes and introduced an API to create custom ones (Some people didn't like the way to calculate the post priority based on the count of user comments. This will give you the possibility to develop custom priority providers which fit your needs .)
• Added support to use the Popularity Contest plugin by Alex King to calculate post priority (If you are already using the Popularity Contest plugin, this will be the best way to determine the priority of the posts. Uses to new priority API noted above.)
• Added option to exclude password protected posts (This was one of the most requested features.)
• Posts and pages marked for publish with a date in the future won’t be included
• Added function to start sitemap creation via GET and a secret key (If you are using external software which directly writes into the database without using the WordPress API, you can rebuild the sitemap with a simple HTTP Request. This can be made with a cron job for example.)
• Improved compatibility with other plugins (There should no longer be problems with other plugins now which checked for existence of a specified function to determine if you are in the control panel or not.)
• Recoded plugin architecture which is now fully OOP (The code is now cleaner and better to understand which makes it easier to modify. This should also avoid namespace problems.)
• Improved speed and optimized settings handling (Settings and pages are only loaded if the sitemap generation process starts and not every time a page loads. This saves one MySQL Query on every request.)
• Added Button to restore default configuration (Messed up the config? You’ll need just one click to restore all settings.)
• Added log file to check everything is running (In the new log window you can see when your sitemap was rebuilt or if there was any error.)
• Improved user interface
• Added several links to homepage and support (This includes the Notify List about new releases and the WordPress support forum.)

2.7 (2005-11-25)

• Added Polish Translation by kuba

2.7 (2005-11-01)

• Added French Translation by Thierry Lanfranchi

2.7 (2005-07-21)

• Fixed bug with incorrect date in additional pages (wrong format)
• Added Swedish Translation by Tobias Bergius

2.6 (2005-07-16)

• Included Chinese (Simplified) language files by june6

2.6 (2005-07-04)

• Added support to store the files at a custom location
• Changed the home URL to have a slash at the end
• Fixed errors with wp-mail
• Added support for other plugins to add content to the sitemap

2.5 (2005-06-15)

• You can include now external pages which aren’t generated by WordPress or are not recognized by this plugin
• You can define a minimum post priority, which will override the calculated value if it’s too low
• The plugin will automatically ping Google whenever the sitemap gets regenerated
• Update 1: Included Spanish translations by Cesar Gomez Martin
• Update 2: Included Italian translations by Stefano Aglietti
• Update 3: Included Traditional Chinese Translation by Kirin Lin

2.2 (2005-06-08)

• Language file support: Hiromasa from http://hiromasa.zone.ne.jp sent me a Japanese version of the user interface and modified the script to support it! Thanks for this! Check the WordPress Codex how to set the language in WordPress.
• Japanese added user interface Hiromasa
• Added German user interface

2.12 (2005-06-07)

• Changed SQL query for categories which also works on MySQL 3

2.11 (2005-06-07)

• Fixed hardname-tableau which produced a SQL error

2.1 (2005-06-07)

• Can also generate a gzipped version of the xml file (sitemap.xml.gz)
• Uses correct last modified dates for categories and archives. (Thanks thx Rodney Shupe for SQL)
• Now supports different WordPress/Blog directories
• Fixed a bug that ignored different post/page priorities (Reported by Brad)

2.01 (2005-06-07)

• Fixed compatibility for PHP installations that are not configured to use short public tags
• Changed line 147 from _e($i); on _e(strval($i));
• Thanks to Christian Aust for this post!