Submit your sitemap to search engines
Our plugin can create sitemaps for the various sections of your website. That makes it easier for search engines to understand your site structure. We combine all of the individual sitemaps into a sitemap index. This means you only have to submit the sitemap index link which is automatically updated as you add, remove, or change your content. The same sitemap index is used by our add-ons like Yoast SEO: News and Yoast SEO: Local.
If you haven’t enabled our sitemaps, please follow these steps first and, if needed, customize your sitemap index for your website needs.
Table of contents
How to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
- Sign in to Google Search Console
If you’ve not done so, add your site to Google Search Console.
- In the sidebar, select your website
- Under Index, go to Sitemaps
- Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps
- Under Add a new sitemap, enter sitemap_index.xml to complete the URL
Note: A domain property will not show the domain for the field. Please use the full sitemap URL. - Click Submit
How to remove your sitemap from Google Search Console
If you made a mistake submitting the sitemap_index.xml file or if you need to remove some other sitemap, you can delete it and re-submit it. Doing so is not expected to hurt the SEO of your site.
- Sign in to Google Search Console
- In the sidebar, select your website
- Under Index, go to Sitemaps
- Under Submitted sitemaps, click on the sitemap you want to remove
- Open the three-dot menu and click Remove Sitemap
If needed, you can re-add the sitemap.
How to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools no longer accepts sitemap submissions. Please use the new Google Search Console.
How to submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
Please add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools first. To submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools, please follow the steps below.
- Go to Bing Webmaster Tools
- Select your site
- Go to Sitemaps
- Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps
- In the top right corner, go to Submit sitemap
- Enter your sitemap URL
- Click Submit
How to submit your sitemap to Yandex Webmaster
Please add your site to Yandex Webmaster first. To submit your site to Yandex Webmaster, please follow the steps below. I
- Go to Yandex Webmaster
- Select your website
- Go to Indexing
- Go to Sitemap files
- Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps
- Enter your sitemap URL
- Click Add
Other search engines
Yahoo site explorer was replaced by Bing Webmaster Tools.
Ask.com no longer accepts sitemap submissions.
Pinging search engines
After you have manually connected the sitemaps to Bing and Google, each time a post is updated Yoast will then automatically ping the search engines to have them come crawl the sitemap.
This filter can be used to disable all pinging for all search engines. It would go into the functions.php
. If you are not sure how or where to add the code, your host provider or theme developer can help.
add_filter ('wpseo_allow_xml_sitemap_ping', '__return_false');