Sitemap sort order

Hello!

There is. Here’s the logic of TSF’s sitemap:

1. The front page is added first;
2. Then the blog page, if any;
3. Hierarchical post types (pages) are added thereafter, from old to new (ascending by “publishing” date);
4. Non-hierarchical post types (posts) are added last. Those, from new to old (descending by “modification” date);
5. Finally, custom posts can be added by other developers, but this should not be necessary.

The query limit (default 1000 as of TSF v4.1.5) caps hierarchical and non-hierarchical post types separately. So, with a limit of 1000, you can have 2000 posts in your sitemap: 1000 pages and 1000 posts. In theory, you can have 2002 entries; that’s when the front/blog pages are assigned a page over the query limit.

We ordered the pages like so for the most critical pages are often published first. Although unlikely, new pages won’t get added if the query limit is reached for hierarchical post types.

We ordered the posts like so for the timestamp can then tell search engines a page needs recrawling, having this displayed on top ensures it’s included in the sitemap. This works akin to Google News Sitemap, which may only contain posts of the past two days.

There’s no reason to hold posts in the sitemap of which search engines have already recorded changes. We offer no advanced control for the post/page order because we’ve found even the most revered SEO “gurus” do not understand how search engines read sitemaps.

To learn more, please see https://tsf.fyi/kb/sitemap.

Cool. As always, thanks for the education. =8-)