sitemap questions

Hi. Do I need to put a link on my website to my sitemap in order for google to crawl it or is it enough just to have sitemap.xml file on your server?

Another thing - I have WP blog. Only home page was indexed. I installed sitemap and it generated all the posts. BUT the funny thing - now I have home page and archive pages indexed, but still not posts indexed. Funny is that archive pages (like domain.com/2011/02) are not even generated by sitemap, but yet they got indexed and posts that were generated by sitemap were not indexed. How come?

Thanks

Hi. Do I need to put a link on my website to my sitemap in order for google to crawl it or is it enough just to have sitemap.xml file on your server?

Click to expand...

no, google will look for it if it's at sitemap.xml or sitemaps.xml, or if it's been pinged.

That being said, it helps to do this to link to it to get it routinely crawled, as well theoretically add a bit of link juice across the site. Just put it down by a privacy / disclaimer link

Another thing - I have WP blog. Only home page was indexed. I installed sitemap and it generated all the posts. BUT the funny thing - now I have home page and archive pages indexed, but still not posts indexed. Funny is that archive pages (like domain.com/2011/02) are not even generated by sitemap, but yet they got indexed and posts that were generated by sitemap were not indexed. How come?

Thanks

Click to expand...

I find that having /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname% for the permalinks helps ensure that google's pulling out your posts as opposed you our archive / category / tag pages

that being said, if it's still a very new blog, then my best answer would be patience, young jedi

You seem to be a bit confused about what the sitemap plugin does. All the sitemap plugin does is generate the site map xml file and ping the SEs whenever it's updated. All of the post and the archive pages are generated by wordpress itself in standard configuration although the specifics of how the pages are structured is determined by the theme.

If it's a new site, wait and see what happens. Try and get backlinks to your individual post pages. If the post pages still don't get indexed eventually, you may have a dupe content issue between your index page, your archive pages and your post pages - a common problem with wordpress.

If that's the case, consider changing your index and archive pages to just show the excerpt from each post, not the whole post. Also consider adding the follow / noindex robots meta tags to your archive pages so that the links on your archive pages get spidered but the pages themselves don't get indexed, reducing your dupe content problem.

sitemaps are over rated