It’s important to have a sitemap if you want your blog to be completely scraped by Google. Here’s a guide to setting up a sitemap for your blog using the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.

Installing the Plugin

You would install the plugin as you would any other plugin. I’m not going to go over this process in depth. If you need more details, check here. Note that this plugin requires configuration after you install it, so don’t just stop here.

Configuring the Plugin

Head over the the configuration panel for the plugin. You can get to it by clicking ‘XML-Sitemap’ on the left navigation under ‘Settings’, or by clicking ‘CONFIGURATION’ in the plugin description right after you install it.

You will see a top area with some information about the status of your sitemap, and then a box full of basic options that you can change. I’m going to go over what each basic option does.

1. Write a normal XML file (your filename) – This determines if the plugin creates a normal sitemap for your site. This doesn’t have to be checked – all of the major search engines will accept the tar.gz’d version of your sitemap. You may as well leave it checked though, it only takes up a few extra kB on your server.
2. Write a gzipped file (your filename + .gz) – This determines if the plugin creates a packed version of the sitemap for your site. Since this version of the sitemap is smaller (it downloads faster), search engines prefer to use this version. Keep this box checked.
3. Rebuild sitemap if you change the content of your blog – This determines if the plugin updates your sitemap when you make changes on your site. I highly suggest that you keep this checked – the whole point of having the sitemap is so that you can get indexed quickly. If your sitemap isn’t updated as quick as possible, it’s not as helpful.
4. Enable manual sitemap building via GET Request – This isn’t a configuration option that you have to worry about. It allows you to update your sitemap by accessing a URL, but it’s just as easy to do it from the WordPress Admin panel.
5. Notify Google (Ask.com, Yahoo) about updates of your Blog – All of the options in the next section have the same purpose. You want to keep them checked – they determine if different major search engines are notified when you update your sitemap. You want them to be notified so that they can update their indexes to match your site. As I said earlier, having a sitemap is pointless if search engines aren’t aware of it as soon as possible. The default values will do, but it may also be a good idea to register a key so that Yahoo! is notified when your sitemap is updated also.
6. Add sitemap URL to the virtual robots.txt file – This is similar to the previous option. Search engines will check your ‘robots.txt’ file for information on what they should crawl. This will add your sitemap to that file so that search engines are aware that it exists.
7. Limit the number of posts in the sitemap – Here you can limit the amount of posts that appear in your sitemap. This may be a good idea if you have a large number of posts, especially if you have problems building the sitemap. If not, you should be fine leaving this blank.
8. Try to increase the memory limit to – If you have a very large sitemap, it will require a lot of memory to be created. If you enter a value here, the memory limit will be raised so that the sitemap can be built. Again, only enter a value here if you are having trouble building the sitemap.
9. Try to increase the execution time limit to – This option is similar to the previous, but it refers to the execution time of the script instead of the memory. Only change it if you are experiencing problems building the sitemap.
10. Include a XSLT stylesheet – This determines the formatting for your sitemap. You will be fine with the default one, don’t change this.
11. Enable MySQL standard mode. Use this only if you’re getting MySQL errors. (Needs much more memory!) – This disables any memory saving techniques that may cause you to have trouble building the sitemap. If you enable this, you may have to raise the memory limit.
12. Build the sitemap in a background process (You don’t have to wait when you save a post) – Keep this checked. If it is unchecked, the sitemap will be build in the foreground. This means that you will have to wait (it will appear that the page is taking forever to load) as the sitemap is built. It’s much easier to just have it done in the background, especially if you have a lot of posts that would cause this process to be lengthy.

Building the Sitemap

Now that that is done with, let’s talk about building the sitemap. There is pretty much only one thing that can go wrong when building the sitemap.

1. There was a problem writing your sitemap file. Make sure the file exists and is writable. – This is the only error that you can get. To fix this, you have to chmod your WordPress directory so that the plugin has permission to write the sitemap files. You can do this from terminal or from any FTP program. For a guide on changing file permissions (chmod’ing), go here. You want to chmod the folder to 777 to allow the plugin to write the sitemap.

That’s about it. The sitemap creation process is fairly self explanatory. You only have to build the sitemap the first time. From that point on, it will be done automatically. If anyone needs more details on how to build the sitemap, please leave a comment. I will be happy to guide you through it.

Also, if anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. :)

Tags: Google XML Sitemaps, WordPress Google Sitemaps, WordPress Plugin