About the permalink structure: in my view, it really does not matter which permalink structure you choose. Why not just the usual one with the date in it? The days that Google took notice of how near the title terms were to the top level domain name in the URL (closer to the beginning meant higher importance) have long gone. It's more about linking now anyway. Your latest news needs to be linked to directly from the home page :)

If you are sure you have activated the plugin, you might try to resave your Permalink structure...

After that, you will need to remove the physical files called sitemap.xml and sitemap-news.xml (plus maybe the versions with .gz behind their names) and if there is a robots.txt file in your site root, you will need to remove that as well.

My plugin will not (re)create any of these files but they will be dynamically served just like normal feeds.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/

Maybe someone there can shed light on this.

When you deactivate W3TC, sitemaps are perfect, it's just when its running that problems happen.

oh the fun:)

Over on the Webmaster Tools, they just tell people to go to a site that makes your sitemaps for you, but c'mon, those of us with very busy sites with breaking news just don't want to create a new sitemap by hand everytime you post a story (most of us 6-10 per day).

What happens if you switch off gzip/deflate compression for the sitemap but keep caching on? Or is that not possible?

In W3 TC, I have sitemap.xml listed for caching, but I've noticed on a search in Google Webmaster Tools, a lot of people are having this issue with their sitemaps. I thought it was an issue with the Wordpress SEO plugin, but when your came up like that too, I knew something was going on.

When I deactivate W3TC though, it's fine which led me to think that there might be something with that since that's gotta be one of the most temperental (but effective) plugins I've ever seen.

Is this happening only to the sitemap-newsw.xml or also the regular sitemap.xml ? And what does Google say when you add the non-pretty URLs:

http://bestmoviesevernews.com/?feed=sitemap
http://bestmoviesevernews.com/?feed=sitemap-news

And did you test with X3TC switched off?

Another thing you might try is removing the sitemap.xml.gz from your site root. The zipped content seems to be completely garbled... It might be that Google takes it to be the zipped version of the sitemap.xml feed.

I switched over to your sitemap after using Yoast's Wordpress SEO. Google Webmaster Tools began putting the big red 'X' on those sitemaps with the warning:

Sitemap is HTML
Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead.

Now they've begun doing it for yours too. I'm hoping that someone else has known how to resolve this one. The sitemap comes up find when I bring it up

'http://bestmoviesevernews.com/sitemap-news.xml/'

and there's definitely no HTML coding i it, so I'm a little stumped.

I don't know if W3 Total Cache is creating a little issue with this or now.

Thanks,

Curt

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/

I've noticed Bing can take a really long time to revisit a sitemap after re-submission. So thanks for your patience and reporting back on this.

Oh... could you mark this thread as resolved please?

I resubmitted the Sitemap.xml file to Bing and it came back with 'Success' and 'No problems or errors found.'

I guess it was just an intermittent issue with Bing rather than the plugin or file structure.

Thanks for your help guys.

I am still using the old plugin as I had submitted the Sitemap again after I created this thread just to see what would happen. It's showing up as 'Pending' in Bing now with the type being 'Unknown,' I'm not sure how long it will take their spider to crawl it, but I'll update this thread if the problem persists or I get more info on it.

Thanks for checking it out.

One thing I would like to suggest is to try the development version of XML Sitemap Feed.

The one I've been using is this one:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/

I will give the one you posted a try. Hopefully that will fix everything.

also, that's a normal looking site map these days

I'm not sure if this is the right section or not, but I'm having a slight issue (maybe not really an issue) with my sitemap with Wordpress.

I'm using the plugin called "XML Sitemap Feed" which says its compatible with Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. but when I submit my sitemap to Bing Webmaster Center it shows up as 'Errors have occurred' and when I click on the sitemap link is says Bing encountered 'Unknown error' while processing my sitemap.

I'm not sure if it's a problem with the way the plugin is structuring the file or with Bing itself, but it seems my Sitemap isn't working at the minute.

Here's a link to my sitemap.xml file:

http://www.atopic-dermatitis-treatment.com/sitemap.xml

Is that how it's supposed to look?

Also if you have a suggestion for another Sitemap plugin that doesn't throw errors, I'd love to hear them

That's a sound idea. - I will forward your plans to my SEO guys who will be happy about it. :)

Greetz,
Berny

Good to hear it works :)

With "exclude by post meta key/value" I mean that giving a post or page a custom meta key like "sitemap_exclude" and value "yes" (or 1) would make that post/page be excluded from the sitemap...

I do not have time the coming weeks to work on it but as soon as any of this is in the dev version, I'll let you know. Maybe send me a reminder if you don't hear from me for too long ;)

I've been using WP a long time and the permalink structure /%postname%/ has always caused problems. Not only for plugins but other (even WP internal) functionality too. In fact, I am surprised that up to this day, that permalink structure is still even allowed...

I agree with you on that. - From a coder's point of view, I also prefer order and hierarchy in pages, posts, archives. Nevertheless, as you've mentioned there are reasons and for which our SEO department needs such a link-'structure'.

So I would like to ask you to do a test upgrade to the development version to see if that trailing slash still occurs.

I installed your dev-version on our staging-server after having a look onto your source code. - Nice idea. - Your function also protects other 'generated files' from being trail-slashed and it works great over here. :)

I'll take the exclude filter in to consideration too. It's not a bad idea and will likely make it into the development version soon :) Would you mind if it would be in the form of a post meta key/value to exclude a posts from the sitemap?

Perfect and thanks. I'm not sure what you mean by post meta key/value? Or do you also plan to block pages by slug and not only by Ids?

Greetz,
Berny

But ok, I get the point of wanting to use that permalink structure. I would to, if it was not so problematic.

In any case, I had seen that trailing slash in some other instances as well and had already implemented another workaround in the development version. So I would like to ask you to do a test upgrade to the development version to see if that trailing slash still occurs. If it does, I'll consider your approach as an alternative.

I'll take the exclude filter in to consideration too. It's not a bad idea and will likely make it into the development version soon :) Would you mind if it would be in the form of a post meta key/value to exclude a posts from the sitemap?

Thanks for the multi-site network functionality of your plugin. - It will help to realize the vision of a multi-lingual installation of our current information portal. :)

As WordPress can sometimes be very greedy on URL-handling, I ran into the following issue comprising the combination your sitemaps(-news).xml redirect and the /%postname%/ permalink structure. FYI: The sitemap serves just fine, but http://mydomain.com/sitemap.xml gets redirected to http://mydomain.com/sitemap.xml/ Please note the trailing slash which some spiders would probably mis-interpret.

After a bit of research I implemented the following code which seems to solve the problem:

In the constructor of XMLSitemapFeed.class.php I've added

// REMOVE TRAILING SLASH
add_action('pre_get_posts', array(__CLASS__, 'remove_redirect_canonical') );

And the following function tells WordPress to remove the built-in canonical redirect if we're handling a sitemap-feed.

//remove trailing slash
function remove_redirect_canonical() {
	global $wp_query;

	if (is_feed() && in_array($wp_query->get('feed'), array('sitemap', 'sitemap-news')))
		remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
}

Hope this will help others, too.

A feature suggestion: What do you think about an exclude-filter for your query_posts calls? - That way we could easily leave out a list of posts/pages and Google wouldn't return an error in the Webmaster-Tools because a sitemap-item is blocked for example by robots.txt.

Greetz,
Berny

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/

Do I detect BuddyPress running on that site? Maybe that's causing this... Or W3 Total Cache... Did you try switching that off temporarily?

http://philliesnation.com/?feed=sitemap
http://philliesnation.com/sitemap.xml

They both resolve to the following error:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://philliesnation.com/?feed=sitemap
Line Number 1, Column 1:

Does this mean my sitemap is not working?