[Plugin: WordPress SEO by Yoast] Sitemaps

BeeJayEff,
I just looked at my sitemap index. If you go to /sitemap_index.xml on your site, you should find an index to the sitemaps. That should show you where they are.

Thanks for that. How do I get them included in robots.txt ?

As far as I understand the code, there are NO associated files – all maps are dynamically generated

I’ve been looking at it because in my case, it’s a major drawback since it takes a lot of time ( actually more than the proxy timeout ?? ) to generate the code, hence actually it failed…

Hmm, I thought that the robots.txt file was dynamically created (which is why I cannot see it via ftp), but that the sitemaps themselves were (usually) automatically generated by plugins such as Yoast or “Google xml sitemaps” whenever you updated a page or post on the site. But I have only seen Sitemap.xml (and .gz) in my robots file, whereas Yoast generates four different Sitemaps – how do bots get to see them ?

because the site map are dynamically generated on call – there is an rather smart url scheme so that every sitemap has its own url which is decoded by the plugin => every time the url is requested, the plugin is handling the processing of it => decode it to know which type of map to generate => generate it => output it.

OK, but if I look at my robots.txt in Webmaster tools, I only ever see the one sitemap.xml listed there – not the ones generated by Yoast. Maybe I just shouldn’t be worrying about it ! My real problem is still getting Fetch as Google to work at all – or at least tell me why it always fails !!!

actually the plugin doesn’t touch on robots.txt but use the ping mechanism to let google/bing know there’s a new sitemap in the town.

the root sitemap of your site is at : https://your-domain/sitemap_index.xml

G’day,

Sitemap ‘files’ take at least two forms. The first form is an index to other sitemaps. The second form is a list of URLs.

WordPress SEO generates an sitemap index on request ‘sitemap_index.xml’. This index has the list of actual sitemaps available. You submit the index to the search engines.

The sitemaps don’t exist as files on your server. They are generated on demand.

As best as I can tell, the WordPress SEO plugin doesn’t make any changes to your robots.txt file. If a reference to a sitemap is there, then it’s been put there manually, or by some other plugin.

I typically manually edit my robots.txt files and add a pointer to the WordPress SEO generated sitemap. For example:
Sitemap: https://www.livinglegends.org.au/sitemap_index.xml

Best regards, Lloyd Borrett.