Getting the sitemap right

  • Resolved unklee

    (@unklee)


    6 years, 6 months ago

    Hi, I have been managing a self-hosted HTML and now WordPress site for many years, but I am finding myself unsure if I am still up-to-date with sitemaps for Google and others, and would appreciate some advice please.

    In the old HTML days, I used a sitemap generator to produce a sitemap for the HTMP pages, and when I added a new HTML page I updated the sitemap manually – wasn’t too hard. The blog was in a /blog subdirectory of the HTML site and WordPress generated a separate sitemaps for the blog.

    But since I’ve been on WordPress, with blog pages as well as static pages all in WordPress, I have relied totally on a WordPress sitemap generator (currently Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold).

    I am unsure if all my pages and posts are appearing and I want to check. But when I try to view the sitemap, I get a page that doesn’t look anything like what I though a sitemap would look like – it doesn’t contain any pages, but appears to be links to sub-sitemaps that update what has been added to the datebase that month – is that correct?

    My website is set up so the static home page in is the root directory, but WordPress is in a /blog subdirectory – this way the blog posts appear as https://sitename/blog/postname while the pages appear as https://sitename/parentpage/childpagename. I’m wondering whether the sitemap generator copes well with this non-standard layout.

    Is anyone able to reassure me and explain things for me please, and/or tell me how I can check that all my pages and posts are included in the sitemap? Thanks.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • What you’re looking at there is an XML sitemap, not a HTML sitemap. They are two very different things.

    The XML sitemap is what Google wants. It’s not meant ot be a human-readable document, but basically a dataset that they can crawl and index from.

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    OK, thanks. So it’s quite different from what I used to update manually. Is there any way I can check what Google is seeing?

    You can use Googles Webmasters tools to let you see the sitemaps and what they contain. But really, it’s not that intesting. If they’re correct, which they should be, it’s just a formatted list of titles and URL’s.

    Thread Starter unklee

    (@unklee)

    I was concerned because there didn’t seem to be enough items in the sitemaps I could see. But I was able to get a summary of the sitemaps and there are 551 pages submitted and 237 indexed, and I guess that looks about right (the 551, anyway).

    So thanks for your help. I guess the next step is to find out why only 237 are indexed.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘Getting the sitemap right’ is closed to new replies.

Tags