WordPress Sitemaps

With sitemaps, you give Google and Bing a blueprint or city plan of your WordPress project. It makes it easier for the search engines to recognize all links and their hierarchy. They are an important way to get faster with the right links in the Google index. Incidentally, visual sitemaps – that is, overview pages with a tree structure of all URLs – are no longer used today. You just submit sitemaps directly to the search engines.

Settings

  1. Must have for every website is the standard sitemap. If you activate it, the posts and pages of your project are automatically added. If you want to add more types of content or if you do not use a blog, for example, you can change this in the professional settings under the plus sign.
  2. Pictures Sitemaps are needed if you have your own footage. On the other hand, if you only use (licensed) stock material, you do not need sitemaps for images because your images are only duplicates and not relevant to SEO.
  3. You should activate the video sitemap if you want to push movies from your library. Videos you embed on YouTube, Vimeo, or other platforms will not be included here. You should then set these via our structured data.
  4. You need a Google News sitemap if your blog is also enabled for Google News. Google News is an extra section of the search engine that indexes content very quickly and displays it prominently, with current topics at the top, in the search results. It is therefore a super strong source for more visitors from Google, so it is difficult to log his page for Google News: you need your own, high-quality editorial texts on current topics and must meet certain requirements in order to be included there. If you’re listed on Google News, you’ll need to sign in to the Google News Publisher Center to subscribe to the sitemap.

Submission

After creating the sitemaps, you go to the Google Search Console and in the tab “Sitemaps” you enter all created blueprints. Just add the back part of the URL under “Add a new sitemap” and then click “Submit”. So for example:

sitemap.xml
image-sitemap.xml
video-sitemap.xml
news-sitemap.xml

Shortly after submitting until a few days later, you will see in the status column if your sitemap has been submitted successfully. If an error appears, it’s usually because another solution blocks our virtual sitemap. Then please check your theme settings, other SEO plugins and the FTP root directory of your WordPress installation to see if there is any sitemap setting or file active that blocks our plugin.

We recommend that you check the status of your sitemap at least once in Google Search Console after successful submission.

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