Google Sitemaps with Wordpress
I spent a little time and worked up some php code that generates a Google Sitemap from a Wordpress site. The php code generates a Google Sitemap xml file with all your posts ordered by time - newest posts first. Here’s a link to my Google Sitemap so you can see how it looks.
I’m sure there are ways to improve on my code so go right ahead. If you do, just leave me a comment. I might want to download it from you.
Just copy this code into a php file.
You can refer back to my previous post to read more about the Google Sitemaps Protocol and how you can submit your Google Sitemap.
Update: Wanted to point out that this generates a Google Sitemap from all your posts. There is no page support or category support. It is real basic and can definitely be improved.
Update #2: I won’t be writing a plugin for this since Arne Brachhold has already written a great one. Thanks Arne.
Michael Nguyen | Search Engine Optimization | Comments (103)
June 3rd, 2005 at 12:37 am
Quick and nice start to help the community use this new Google feature, thanks for it.
I have a couple suggestions that are easy to implement :
use gzencode to produce a lighter .tgz instead of raw xml. Since Google accepts gzipp’ed documents, let’s not waste our bandwidth
modify your SQL query : not only “post_status = ‘publish’” but also “post_status = ’static’” to indexes pages as well as posts
you could probably fine tune the priority rather easily : for example checking post_modified, and giving a different priority depending on how old the post is.
This said, I (we ?) have no clue of what Google will do with this priority …
You could add a “loc” entry for categories as well. I find my category pages (/category/linux/ etc..) are quite often accessed from Google searches, so I think it’s important they’re well crawled and indexed as well.
I also have a few ideas of further improvements that will be quickly needed
You could easily make your script a plugin that would be run when a post is either created or modified.
The thing I’d suggest here is that the sitemap is updated when a post is modified, and that it is updated and submitted to Google when a post is created (with maybe a maximum number of daily submission, although I couldn’t find any guidelines about this on Google’s pages)
This would make another feature quite mandatory : it’d be a waste of computer time to generate the whole sitemap each time a post is created, especially on large blogs with numerous posts. A workaround would be to make incremental updates.
It could be done by dynamically generate entry for latest post and merge it with a static file containing all previous posts.
So. This were my first thoughts about your work. Again, thank you for being quick on this.
June 3rd, 2005 at 12:57 am
Google’s Sitemap Protocol
Google establishes a protocol to define a site map. A generator for WP is already available
…
June 3rd, 2005 at 1:33 am
Many thanks for that - however, just a quick question - is this going to be difficult to work with presenting an individual feed for individual category groups, or will it only work with generating a feed for the entire WP site?
June 3rd, 2005 at 4:34 am
Google Sitemaps: Free PFI
Last night Danny Sullivan broke the news on a new free service Google is offering named Google Sitemaps. Simply put, this program allows “webmasters and site owners to feed it pages they’d like to have included in Google’s web index.”…
June 3rd, 2005 at 5:59 am
Google Sitemaps
? Google???????????
????????? Google ??????? Google Sitemaps ???????????? Google ?????????????? Google ????????????…
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:01 am
Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps es un experimento en beta de Google que permite a los webmasters enviar mapas completos de sus sitios webs para que Google los indexe mejor. Los mapas son simplemente una lista con todas las URLs, bien en XML…
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:05 am
I knew somebody would come out with this. Great job! I’ll try it out later today.
June 3rd, 2005 at 12:14 pm
Awesome! Thanks!
June 3rd, 2005 at 12:40 pm
Google Releases Sitemaps Beta
Google announced today the start of Google Sitemaps, a program for more effecient spidering of websites. From their about page: Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand…
June 3rd, 2005 at 12:47 pm
Google sitemap
Da Photo Matt vengo a conoscenza dell’implementazione pronta all’uso, per i possessori di CMS WordPress, di Google Sitemap.
Si trova sul sito Social Patterns - Michael Nguyen on Search Engine Marketing, nell’articolo
Google Sitemaps…
June 3rd, 2005 at 1:42 pm
Google Sitemap with Wordpress
Generate a neat Google Sitemap with Wordpress. Very nice little piece of code that will generate a Google Sitemap based on your Wordpress posts, from most recent to oldest. This will surely make adding a sitemap to a Wordpress based site quite easy!
…
June 3rd, 2005 at 3:23 pm
Awesome…thanks for this nice little script!
June 3rd, 2005 at 4:10 pm
Thanks - absolute plug-n-play. This will be interesting to see how it goes.
Sarah
June 3rd, 2005 at 7:50 pm
I hope you dont mind but Ive made your script output a gzipped version of the sitemap to save bandwidth.
heres the changed code…
http://thedt.net/random/sitemap.txt
June 3rd, 2005 at 8:34 pm
awesome, thanks for the code.
June 3rd, 2005 at 9:19 pm
links for 2005-06-04
wma2mp3 BASH script converting WMA to MP3 using Mplayer (tags: MP3 BASH WMA) Little Boxes (tags: CSS Design HTML)…
June 3rd, 2005 at 10:13 pm
Ditto, thankyou :O)
June 3rd, 2005 at 11:21 pm
Hey there! Thanks for the idea, I spent a few minutes working it into my own CMS.
http://www.hinkybox.com/devpages/gsitemap.phps
Re: categories & sitemap sitemap; I have some down time so if I come up with
something psuedocodey I will comment again.
One little question, as I am not very familiar with the inner workings of Wordpress: Are all dates UTC/Zulu?
Thanks man!
June 4th, 2005 at 12:29 am
Google Sitemap for WordPress
Create Google Sitemaps with WordPress.
June 4th, 2005 at 1:47 am
With regard to the suggestion to have the script submit new ones every so often, the guidelines for Google’s own generator say a maximum of once per hour.
June 4th, 2005 at 8:09 am
WordPress Sitemap
“Google Sitemaps es un experimento en beta de Google que permite a los webmasters enviar mapas completos de sus sitios webs para que Google los indexe mejor […]” - Microsiervos, 03/06/05
He aadido una pequea mejora al nico tro…
June 4th, 2005 at 8:55 am
Wow, thanks for all the comments - I’ll be out this weekend but I’ll try and improve the script during next week.
June 4th, 2005 at 11:42 am
Thanks for the great script guys. I’ve managed to get my sitemap up and running but Google doesn’t like the code somehow.
When submitted, Google returns the error ‘We couldn’t find the Sitemap at the location you provided. Please make sure the Sitemap URL is correct and resubmit your Sitemap.’
Anyone else come across this yet?
June 4th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
I’ve also modded your script, it now includes category support and page support. Couldn’t get it to gzip though for some reason. Here’s my edited sitemap code
June 4th, 2005 at 12:09 pm
Google Sitemaps help indexing
Google released a new tool for webmaster: Google sitemaps. The Google Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engine crawlers about URLs on your Web sites that are available for crawling. A Sitemap consists of a list of URLs and may also contain …
June 4th, 2005 at 1:33 pm
Google Sitemap
El 2 de junio pasado Google anunció un nuevo servicio: Google Sitemaps. ¿Qué es? y ¿cómo nos beneficia?…
June 4th, 2005 at 2:55 pm
Hi,
i found another one which also includes static pages. The priority gets calculated by the number of comments relative to the whole number of comments. Nice coded.
http://www.arnebrachhold.de
June 4th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
Thanks for the generator, works great. Thankyou!
June 4th, 2005 at 7:27 pm
Hello
I think you need to use utf8_encode to be on the safe side…
echo utf8_encode('’); ?>
always
1.0
get_results(”SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ ORDER by post_modified DESC”); ?>
ID)); ?>
post_modified, false)); ?>
daily
0.8
June 4th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
oops, sorry about that last post. That is pretty ugly.
try this:
http://goofymoo.com/oops.txt
take care
June 4th, 2005 at 8:35 pm
Ozh said, “The thing Id suggest here is that the sitemap is updated when a post is modified […] itd be a waste of computer time to generate the whole sitemap each time a post is created, especially on large blogs with numerous posts. A workaround would be to make incremental updates.”
Except you can have multiple sitemaps. So, have a sitemap for everything prior to the current month and a second for things added this month. Only the second needs to be recreated and shipped to Google every hour.
June 5th, 2005 at 12:41 am
So, finally… I tried to comment (and trackback) already yesterday with a new script that includes static pages (as Ozh suggested) and also dt’s gzip-compression.
Best thing on this script is the frequency the sitemap is generated. When requested, it is checked whether the last backup is more recent than the last post modification. If necessary, a new backup is generated and eventually, this backup is returned. I’ll see to it to include the new ideas, too.
Get the script at http://sidney.ws4f.us/2005/06/04/keeping-pace-with-google
Oh, and it seems to work with Google, I submitted the map yesterday. Still have to see if they complain now.
Sid.
June 5th, 2005 at 3:05 am
I merged your script with the one by Arne Brachhold, so that the final script also has category pages and can be configured. Also it generates the sitemap only if necessary (it does a backup to a certain file, and if nothing has changed, only the backup is returned.). And I included the idea by dt for gzip.
Hope, youre okay with this.
Download at http://sidney.ws4f.us/2005/06/04/keeping-pace-with-google
Sid
June 5th, 2005 at 4:24 am
Thanks …
I submitted sitemap of my blog thanks to your script … but I get Parsing error. why?
Milos
June 5th, 2005 at 4:35 am
Well, I can only guess. The script works good for me (http://sidney.ws4f.us/sitemap.php), so I’m not sure what the problem is. Can you give me the address or the error? [email: sidney[nospam]440@gmail.com]
June 5th, 2005 at 7:43 am
I have made a very simple explanation and form to create a sitemap. Would love your comments. No PHP or scripting knowledge is required.
Ben
http://www.googlesitemap.info
June 5th, 2005 at 9:58 am
i also kompared one with gz support.
here you can see it.
June 5th, 2005 at 11:40 am
I found another sitemap script with a configuration user interface (WordPress plugin). Look at Google Sitemap Generator v2 (BETA)
Richard
June 6th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
Good work on the script, I used some ideas in it for one tat I was working on to do the same basic thing.
June 6th, 2005 at 4:48 pm
I recommend everyone to use Arne’s plugin - it’s great. Saved me the effort in writing my own.
June 7th, 2005 at 8:35 pm
Nice… I will use it. Thanks
June 7th, 2005 at 8:35 pm
Nice… I will use it. Thanks
June 11th, 2005 at 9:43 am
The Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress works very good. Thanks for the link!
June 11th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
Guys That a great site- great job done thanks…
June 13th, 2005 at 7:02 am
Some competition for Arne
: I converted my original remix into a real plugin for Wordpress. Includes real timezones and saves you some time by only generating if really necessary. Download at my site.
Sid
June 14th, 2005 at 12:19 pm
you just got a link from google
http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html
June 14th, 2005 at 12:37 pm
Thanks for pointing that out Aaron
June 15th, 2005 at 1:20 am
Sorry to spam so much (delete the old posts by me, if you like), but I just wanted to let you know: I added a feature to my plugin that informs Google every time you publish, edit or delete a post. Never again having to submit your sitemap manually.
Also, most (all?) features of Arne Brachhold’s plugin are in it, and real timezones and a min priority for posts (it’s no good if a post has a priority of “0.0″).
http://www.sidney.ws4f.us/2005/06/13/google-sitemap-plugin-sidney-edition
Sid
June 15th, 2005 at 8:51 am
Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress 2.5
Hi there!
Thanks for the great support and popularity of my Google Sitemap Generator to all the users and Bloggers who linked to me, especially to Michael Nguyen from socialpatterns.com who had the idea at first of all.
Since Monday, 6 June 2005 ove…
July 20th, 2005 at 10:43 pm
[…] WP? Google sitemap http://2entwine.com/fotobuzz/ […]
July 25th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
this is exactly what i’ve been looking for, thanks!
August 2nd, 2005 at 8:15 am
Thanks Michael, you are the man. I love the WP community.
August 22nd, 2005 at 2:26 am
here is my rating for your great plugin:
http://www.gangavalli.com/blog/2005/08/16/google-sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/
Good luck!
August 22nd, 2005 at 5:21 am
[…] wordpress, mambo, … […]
August 27th, 2005 at 9:37 am
How WordPress in googlemap?
August 28th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
Google Sitemap
Para las personas que an desconocen el mundo de los weblogs les cuento rpidamente que existen formas de gritarle al mundo que nuestro sitio fue actualizado con una nueva Entrada. y quin escucha esos gritos? —te pregustars t— pue…
September 12th, 2005 at 4:54 am
[…] Wordpress sitemap creator […]
September 13th, 2005 at 3:58 am
[…] Winner by default: Social Patterns […]
September 13th, 2005 at 4:20 am
[…] Two days later, I declared a race winner. Of the 161 search results, Michael Nguyen at Social Patterns was the first to meet the basic judging criteria. At the time, I said I would cover the race again in a week’s time. […]
October 21st, 2005 at 12:49 pm
It may be a good idea to to validate the sitemap before a submission. Since accepted sitemaps get downloaded daily, there is no need for resubmits. In the meantime Google has even added crawler problem reports, great move.
October 29th, 2005 at 7:49 pm
[…] ?Google Sitemaps??????????????????Blog?????????G, Y, B??Google???????????sitemaps??????????Google??????????????????WordPress?????????????Catch me ????????????????.php??????wordpress???????????????????????Sitemaps???????Sitemap?????????????????????? […]
October 31st, 2005 at 11:21 am
For anyone who’s interested… I have a script that turns your Google compliant XML sitemap into a Yahoo compliant sitemap that you can submit to Yahoo.
It’s free.
http://www.ielliott.com/2005/10/31/google-to-yahoo-sitemap/
November 6th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
[…] [1]: http://www.socialpatterns.com/ [2]: http://www.socialpatterns.com/search-engine-optimization/google-sitemaps-with-wordpress/ [3]: http://www.socialpatterns.com/wp-content/googlesitemap.txt Related articles PigeonRank, PeopleRank or TrustRank?Google test new user interfaceTabbed browsing in MSN toolbar, a new bait?Transition Matrices and PageRankSEO, website […]
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[…] WP? Google sitemap […]
December 4th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
[…] ????????????????wordpress google sitemap generator.???????? ???????. ?????English Version?????N??? (English, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese) ? International Version . (??????????????????????????Native Food >__< ). ???Internet ?????blogger???????????????? ??june6?Liang Jin???????Simplified Chinese Version ?????????????????.??????????? ???????SEO(Search Engine Optimization)?? ???????????????? ????????? ????????(a little time && some code = =b). […]
December 4th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
[…] ????????????????wordpress google sitemap generator.???????? ???????. ?????English Version?????N??? (English, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese) ? International Version . (??????????????????????????Native Food >__< ). ???Internet ?????blogger???????????????? ??june6?Liang Jin???????Simplified Chinese Version ?????????????????.??????????? ???????SEO(Search Engine Optimization)?? ???????????????? ????????? ????????(a little time && some code = =b). […]
December 11th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
[…] Michael Nguyen (Wordpress) […]
December 18th, 2005 at 1:56 pm
[…] Thanks for the great support and popularity of my Google Sitemap Generator to all the users and Bloggers who linked to me, especially to Michael Nguyen from socialpatterns.com who had the idea at first of all. […]
December 20th, 2005 at 4:15 am
Visualizing Google Sitemaps
The Google Sitemap is a great new search engine optimization tool. By submitting a sitemap you can inform and controll crawlers in order to make discovery and addition of pages to the Google Index easier and faster.
…
January 6th, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Thanks for providing this plugin, until recently I was using it for my sitemap. After spending some time revitalizing my website I came back here to find the link to the Wordpress plug-in. I have no migrated, but I appreciate the work you did.
January 7th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
I looking for how to generate sitemaps, this tool helped me to generate for my wordpress site
January 8th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Thanks for the comments everyone.
January 9th, 2006 at 2:27 am
Hello All,
I have create http://www.fibre2fashion.com/sitemap.txt
for google sitemap submission but still not varified.
how to used UTF -8 Code in the same sitemap.txt file?
Any online tools or software available to create sitemap.txt for google sitemap.
Waiting for your feedback.
February 14th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
[…] Social Patterns Google sitemap for WordPress […]
February 15th, 2006 at 3:31 am
I am using the Plugin and it works great from Day one.
If your site is not verified than you missed making the dummy Google File and uploading it to your root folder on your server. Once you have the file up there click on the “verify” button.
All that verify means is that the dummy file has not been found or checked yet.
Follow the instructions given by Google on that point and all will be well.
February 18th, 2006 at 8:54 am
I am using the Plugin and it works great from Day one.
February 25th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
[…] zanzare, distrarmi meno, altro e altro (che collide con il “distrarmi meno”). Permalink | // Used for showing and hiding user information in the comment form function ShowUtils() {document.getElementById(”authorinfo”).style.display = “”; document.getElementById(”showinfo”).style.display = “none”; document.getElementById(”hideinfo”).style.display = “”; } function HideUtils() { document.getElementById(”authorinfo”).style.display = “none”; document.getElementById(”showinfo”).style.display = “”; document.getElementById(”hideinfo”).style.display = “none”; } […]
March 24th, 2006 at 9:58 pm
[…] ??????????Google Sitemaps (BETA)??????????Google Sitemaps with Wordpress - Social Patterns??????sitemap.php????????????????????sitemap.php????????????????????http://aoiro.s58.xrea.com/sitemap.php???? Add a Sitemap????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????2005/6/5???WordPress????????????????????????????hiromasa.zone : o) (Blog) Google Sitemaps with Wordpresshiromasa.zone : o) (Blog) Google Sitemaps with Wordpress - next -[MM]MMRT daily life Google Sitemaps with WP:: plasticdreams :: Google Sitemaps (BETA)Google Sitemaps ?????????????????FAQ????????????URL???SEO?????? [??????]2005/06/04 […]
March 31st, 2006 at 3:23 am
[…] Social Patterns Google sitemap for WordPress […]
April 20th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
[…] […]
April 26th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Thanks - absolute plug-n-play. This will be interesting to see how it goes.
April 27th, 2006 at 11:01 am
[…] Update: Michael Nguyen has created some php code to generate wordpress Sitemaps dynamically which has been updated by Dean Sas to include categories in sitemaps also. […]
June 6th, 2006 at 1:01 pm
[…] Michael Nguyen has written a PHP module to allow WordPress users to automatically generate Google Sitemaps. It does the job pretty well and can be found here. […]
July 12th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
[…] ??Google Sitemap ???????????Weblog ????????????????Google ??????????? […]
July 21st, 2006 at 9:14 am
Thanks for the code, great job, it works so pretty !!
July 29th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
[…] In fact, the only mention anyone makes of using the generator script (that I could find) were two instances of problems. Fortunately there’s already a PHP script solution for us folks running WordPress blogs and I suppose I could make one the old fashioned way until then. Okay, maybe abbreviated versions. As long as we’re handcoding, stream of conscious offers some good advice: 1) Dont set your priority really high all the time. Google folks are not stupid. It will penalize you for making everything have a high priority. My advice is set everything at 0.5 and set a few high priority pages as .8, or 1. […]
August 2nd, 2006 at 12:53 pm
[…] http://www.socialpatterns.com/search-engine-optimization/google-sitemaps-with-wordpress/trackback/ […]
August 16th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
[…] Como el WordPress es maravilloso, como dira Josi, hay un plugin creado para generar estos archivos y no preocuparse de ello. Probndolo, me he dado cuenta que ese plugin tiene el problema que los posts ya realizados pero generados para el futuro los muestra, grrrr…. as que me he bajado este otro plugin y aunque daba el mismo error lo he modificado para que NO genere los datos de los post futuros. […]
August 16th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
Hello!
Very good work, simple and eficient code! Thanks a lot. I have noticed an “error”, if you publish some post to be appeared in the future (set future time to them, useful if you are going to be inactive in a comming period…), this script does not respect it and show them.
Another plugin I have showed, as this one http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final has the same problem.
I have updated the query to:
$t = time ();
$today = date (”Y-m-d H:i:s”,$t);
$sitemap = $wpdb->get_results(”SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ AND post_date
August 18th, 2006 at 7:25 am
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September 15th, 2006 at 10:02 am
[…] WP? Google sitemap […]
September 28th, 2006 at 6:06 am
Omg! thx! i’ve fighting with this problem alot of time!… thx ) article really helped
October 3rd, 2006 at 9:41 am
[…] Google Sitemaps for Wordpress is some PHP code written up by Michael Nguyen of socialpatterns.com […]
October 24th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
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November 25th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Thanks for all the hard work on creating this. I plan to put up a Wordpress blog soon and have a lot to learn about the whole process.
You have done a lot of work to help a lot of people here.
Thanks.
January 7th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
[…] Google Sitemaps with Wordpress - Social Patterns Michael Nguyen on Search … Judging the initial WordPress Google Sitemap Plugins Says: … Search Engine Optimization ” SEO For Wordpress Says: … […]
March 12th, 2007 at 12:30 am
[…] 昨天把网站提交到google上，但是它要求我提示一个sitemap，好方便它爬我的网站。 但是我对这个所以的sitemap并不熟悉，其实应该说是一窍不通，于是就在网上找有没有谁已经写出这样的工具来了。 结果找到了这样一个网站： Google Sitemaps with Wordpress — Social Patterns 文章里面提交，有牛人已经写出了针对wordpress的插件： 哈哈，这下可以省事了。 […]
April 12th, 2007 at 9:03 am
[…] per chi utilizza Wordpress come piattaforma per il proprio blog, allora vi consiglio di dare un’occhiata a: . Webdomus.it, partendo dal codice proposto da Social Patterns ha creato uno script per generare una Google Sitemap dei weblog che girano su WordPress 1.0.2 (dovrebbe essere compatibile con tutte le versioni, ma non ho avuto modo di verificarlo) tenendo conto delle diverse priorità di aggiornamento. Per il momento crea solo la mappa (un documento XML) dei post. - Fullo.net consiglia, invece, un altro bel plugin per wordpress per crearvi la sitemap xml. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
May 28th, 2007 at 3:54 am
That’s just amazingly simple and helpful, thank you.
June 21st, 2007 at 11:07 am
Create a sitemap for your blog…
Sitemaps are a useful tool in helping get your blog pages indexed by search engines, which gives your blog extra “visibility” online and can drive more traffic to your site….
April 20th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Great post and very useful information.This plugin is certainly going to help a lot of Wordpress bloggers get quicker search engine optimization.
Thanks very much for the info.
April 21st, 2008 at 2:28 am
Many thanks for Google sitemap. I found this tool very easy and helpful to search sitemaps for blog pages indexed by search engines. I am using the Plugin and it works great. Thanks once again for such kind of plugin.
April 21st, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Sitemaps are a useful tool in helping get your blog pages indexed by search engines, which gives your blog extra “visibility” online. It is good that WordPress users automatically generate Google Sitemaps. Thanks for creating this.