seymour-james

it appears in my case for whatever reason that line 182 in class-sitemaps.php is not working correctly and setting a 404 status code for invalid or empty site maps.

$GLOBALS[‘wp_query’]->is_404 = true;

However if this line is replaced with the code below the correct header is returned for non-existing site map files

global $wp_query;
$wp_query->set_404();
status_header(404);

Problem solved but do not fully understand why $GLOBALS[‘wp_query’]->is_404 = true; is not working correctly – > perhaps W3 Total Cache?

The reason why this could be important is if a spammer knows you are using YOAST, he spam links to “non-existent” pages which appear to search engines as normal pages with 200 O.K. status.

Try this https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/schemaorg-markup . The modifications necessary are not too difficult.

One more thing. Schema.org is a done deal in my opinion. The two driving forces are to improve the semantic element of search which promises much better results and to work against the spammers of this world. In the second case they will need to start connecting their sites to Google accounts which will need to be verified (authors and publishers). Without verification a site may tend to fair less well. What I can say is, for me at least Schema.org has appeared to be the tipping point putting my main portal on page 1 for its main keywords. It jumped quickly and decisively in the search results.

Don’t know if this is useful but my WP blog is marked up for schema.org – Propeties For Sale In France – you can see this if you use the rich snippets tool from google on the link. Its pretty well covered even down to significant links being defined.

Two points of note: the site is very specific in its purpose (offsite landing pages for my property portal – [link moderated] Houses For Sale In France) but the same markup would apply to a general blogging site that most people have. Almost no differences. I modified only two core WP files which were link-template.php and category-template.php to really do some fine tuning on tags becoming significant links, older and more recent links too. The rest was undertaken in the theme itself which is one of my own quick creations (modified files are: archive.php, single.php, sidebar.php, footer.php, header.php and finally index.php). It takes about 40 minutes to do it once you have spent the 5 hours thinking about it – LOL. The last of the above mentioned files index.php was a little tricky as it has static content on it with the 3 latest blog postings embedded in the middle of the content.

Anyone wanting to know more can look me up on google+ which is given in the footer of the aforementioned site. Giving a google+1 to it and its sister site which also fully marked up is always appreciated.