XML Sitemaps and migrating from Wordpress.com

XML Sitemaps or Google Site maps are xml files that list the URLs of your site and metadata (of the URL). This metadata includes the date the URL was updated, how often changes and its importance compared to other URLs in the site. All this information makes “life easier” for the web crawlers of search engine, as well as making sure that all the links are crawled. The sitemap doesn’t guarantee that the search engine will index you site, but it will increase the probability of it. This file is different from the sitemap page of websites, which is a list of pages (represented by its title) so the visitor is able to find them instead of going through every menu option. For more about XML sitemaps you can visit sitemap.org and about the navigational sitemaps (i.e footer of dell.com) check this link here.

For Wordpress there is a plug-in that generates the sitemap of your website or blog: the Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress. It’s called Google Sitemaps because it was first introduced by Google.

When your blog was hosted on Wordpress.com you didn’t need to install this plugin because they will take care of this. However when you migrate your blog or site to hosted solution, you have more freedom and power over your site, and “with more power comes more responsibility”. So we are responsible to generate the xml file so its reported to the search engines. Thankfully this plugin does all the hard work.

Once installed you proceed to generate the sitemap of your website by going to XML-Sitemap option in the Settings menu. Then you will have a screen where you can build the sitemap and configure the plug-in in various forms. The default settings work fine since it will report the sitemap to MSN, Ask and Google. For Yahoo you will need to have Yahoo account and generate a API key that will permit the plug in access the services. You can get the key from here.

You can also use the webmaster tools by Google to manually upload the sitemap. Using the webmaster tools permits you to check for URL that are not found and learn more of how Google is indexing your website.

When I moved the webmaster tools told me that my URL were not found, however when I clicked on them there was no problem. After some time I figure out that the problem was that I changed the permalink structure of the blog. I set it up back to the original structure (from wordpress.com)

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

and the next day I checked everything was OK. If you get a bunch of not found URL in the Google Webmaster tools, check your permalinks that might be the problem.

This post is part of the “G to the Square Wordpress Chronicles”, for more chronicles click here.