XML Sitemap Generator for Google vs Sitemap Generator

Generate XML and HTML sitemaps for your website with ease using the XML Sitemap Generator for Google. This plugin enables you to improve your SEO rankings by creating page, image, news, video, HTML, and RSS sitemaps. It also supports custom post types and taxonomies, allowing you to ensure that all of your content is being indexed by search engines. With a user-friendly interface, you can easily configure the plugin to suit your needs and generate sitemaps in just a few clicks. Keep your website up-to-date and make sure that search engines are aware of all of your content by using the XML Sitemap Generator for Google. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. Supported for more than a decade and rated among the best, it will do exactly what it’s supposed to do – providing a complete XML sitemap for search engines! If you like the plugin, feel free to rate it! 🙂 Related Links: Support Forum License Good news, this plugin is free for everyone! Since it’s released under the GPL, you can use it free of charge on your personal or commercial site. Translations The plugin comes with various translations, please refer to the WordPress Codex for more information about activating the translation. If you want to help to translate the plugin to your language, please have a look at the sitemap.pot file which contains all definitions and may be used with a gettext editor like Poedit (Windows).

The Sitemap Generator uses an external service to crawl your website and create a XML sitemap of your website. The generator works thus for every plugin out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of your site once. If you host your website on a dedicated server, you may not need this plugin, because you should have enough resources to generate your sitemap on your server. But if you host your website in a shared environment (as the most WordPress users do), it could be a good idea to outsource the generation of your sitemap to an external service like this plugin uses to generate the sitemap. This way it is guaranteed that the speed of your website is not affected for your visitors during the generation of the sitemap. Limitations of the free version The Sitemap Generator can be used for free, but the free version is limited. You can create sitemaps for websites with up to 500 URLs. Advanced features like image or video support aren’t available in the free version. The service cannot be offered free of charge for larger websites because the crawling is done by servers operated by the plugin developer and renting and maintaining these servers isn’t cheap. Video Features Simple setup. Works out of the box with all WordPress plugins. Low computation costs for your webserver. Technical Features Respects your robots.txt file (also the crawl-delay directive). You could use the user-agent MB-SiteCrawler to control the crawler. Support for robots (noindex) meta elements. Adds nearly all indexable filetypes (for example .pdf, .xls, .doc) to the sitemap. See the document Sitemap Generator Data on my website for more information. Additional Technical Features of the Pro Version Generation of image sitemaps. Generation of video sitemaps. Currently HTML5 video elements and embedded YouTube videos are supported. Upcoming Technical Features Support for HTML5 picture elements in image sitemaps. Automatic daily creation of sitemaps. Technical Requirements cURL 7.18.1 or higher. Current PHP versions supported by WordPress should provide a compatible cURL version in most hosting environments. OpenSSL 0.9.8f or higher. Data Aggregation and Indexable File Types I have published a detailed document about how the Sitemap Generator aggregates the data for the generation of sitemaps and which file types are getting indexed on my website. Sitemap Generator Data Warnings If you already have an existing sitemap.xml in your WordPress root directory, this file would be overwritten. It is thus recommended to backup your existing sitemap.xml file before using the Sitemap Generator. I also have not tested the generator on Windows webspace. You should also access the sitemap.xml after the generation finished and check if everything is fine. Pre-Installation Verification Test If you like to test if the Sitemap Generator works fine with your website before you will install the plugin, you could use the Online Sitemap Generator on my website, which uses to same technology as the plugin to generate the sitemaps. Use of an External Server The Sitemap Generator uses an external server, operated by the developer of the plugin, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using WordPress. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with the generated sitemap.