In short, XML sitemaps are a list of URLs of a website. Apart from the URLs, they can provide additional data about a page, like when it was last updated, how often it’s get updated, if a page contains images etc.
XML sitemaps help search engines to crawl your website and find all important pages of your site. Usually crawlers simply follow links on your site to find all content. Implying that if your internal linking structure isn’t flawless, they might miss out on some content. This issue can be prevented with an XML sitemap. If you have an XML sitemap that lists all important URLs of your site, you ensure that crawlers will encounter these URLs.
The Yoast SEO plugin creates an XML sitemap for your site. It also allows you to include certain types of pages or not.
On March 6, we released a major update of our Yoast SEO plugin. This update was aimed at making SEO easier and more understandable for our users. We removed quite a few settings and options. In other cases, we changed the names of settings making them easier to understand for non-technical users. All in all, …
Read: "Why we changed so many things in the 7.0 update"
XML sitemaps are an important part of your site because they ensure search engines can crawl all the pages on your site that you want to appear in the search results. It’s up to you to decide what pages you want to include, and what pages are better left unincluded. Keep an eye out for …
Read: "Ask Yoast: Include WooCommerce product tags in your XML sitemap?"
Before a search engine can rank a page or a post it needs to index it. A crawler must discover a piece of content before it can evaluate if it is a valuable addition to its index. One of the ways crawlers discover pages, is by crawling XML sitemaps. After a page has been indexed, …
Read: "Indexing in Yoast SEO: Show x in search results?"
A good XML sitemap is a roadmap to all important pages of a website. This roadmap guides Google to all main content on a website. Having an XML sitemap can be beneficial for SEO, as Google can retrieve essential pages of a website very fast, even if the internal linking of a site isn’t flawless. …
Read: "What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one?"Fact: if your website is set up the right way, you shouldn’t need an XML sitemap at all. You shouldn’t need to think about your category’s XML sitemaps or about including images in your post’s XML sitemap. But why do we keep talking about them like it’s the most important thing ever for SEO? It’s an almost daily …
Read: "The sense and nonsense of XML sitemaps"Your tag and category pages could be very important pages on your site. If you’re using these pages in the right way, they can boost your site’s SEO. You might wonder if you should also include these taxonomy pages in your XML sitemap. In this Ask Yoast we explain whether you should, and why! Our support team received the following question …
Read: "Ask Yoast: Include taxonomies in XML sitemap?"
We’ve just pushed out a new release of Yoast SEO, our flagship plugin. The new version, 3.5, mostly has a metric ton of small bugfixes. In this post, we’ll discuss the most notable changes, but you should mostly be aware that this is what we would call a bugfix release. XML Sitemap changes We’ve decided to …
Read: "Yoast SEO 3.5"
This week we had a few interesting things happening, from a potential update to some new features and an important change in Google Suggest. Let’s dive in! Google adds disambiguation to Suggest In a very interesting move this week, Google added disambiguation results to their suggest box, basically forcing you to choose for a specific topic …
Read: "Weekly SEO recap: Let’s disambiguate!"
Recently, while working on the site for my father in law (in Dutch), I wanted to create an XML sitemap for the many publications on his site, that are downloadable PDF’s. I regularly add PDF’s to his site too, and since I’m a tad bit lazy I don’t want to keep updating the XML sitemap. So …
Read: "XML Sitemap PHP script"So you’ve made the decision and want to migrate from All In One SEO Pack to our Yoast SEO plugin. It seems some people are afraid of taking the big leap. It’s actually fairly easy although it will be partly manual work. You won’t have to rewrite the title or description for any of your posts …
Read: "All In One SEO Pack to Yoast SEO Migration"