From http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#xml-sitemap:
XML Sitemaps are an essential part current day SEO, and can thus not be excluded from a complete WordPress SEO plugin. While there are other WordPress XML Sitemap Generators out there, they don’t talk to your SEO plugin. Meaning that if you noindex a page, preventing it from showing up in Google, it might still be in your sitemap. They also don’t allow you to keep certain taxonomies out of your sitemap. This plugin does. And, to boot, it makes your XML Sitemaps look good by using an XSLT stylesheet on them, so humans can read them too.
Thread Starter
Beee
(@beee)
ok 🙂 that’s a good explanantion…. will give it a go….
Joost,
where is the sitemap generated?
I want to link it in my Webmaster tools
thanks
Paul
Paul,
You should just use yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml as a URL in Webmaster Tools.
Cheers
Joost
I have the following option checked in Yoast WordPress SEO: “Check this box to enable XML sitemap functionality.”
However, I cannot locate any file named sitemap.xml anywhere on my hosted server. Where does this file actually exist? Now that I’m linked with Google Webmaster Tools, anything more I need do to actually create/link it properly?
@thebonereader: did you check if when you open yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml whether it exists?
It’s great that XML sitemap is included but it’s missing some important features like the possibility to include pages outside of wordpress: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpress-seo-by-yoast-how-to-add-non-wordpress-pages-to-sitemap
Also it would be useful to be able to set the priorities for each page type. If my site uses mainly pages instead of posts, I want pages to have high priority instead of low that they are now given automatically.
It’s great that XML sitemap is included but it’s missing some important features like the possibility to include pages outside of wordpress
As explained in that thread too, it’s not an important feature. You can actually add multiple sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools and other search engine’s webmaster tools, and you should.
The other feedback is somewhat more relevant, although you can change priority on a per post / page basis and in all my testing I’ve never seen Google do anything with it.
