Art of Blogging

Want a way to ping Google?

Yeah, I thought that would get your attention.

Go get the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin and put it in and within minutes, you can be pinging Google every time you make a post.

As a bonus, Yahoo! and MSN use the same sitemap structure. Anything that calls Search Engines to index your sites is a good SEO tool.

This installs just fine, but the instructions are pretty vague. No disrespect intended, the author’s German beats mine, I am sure.

The part that confused me is you upload the WHOLE directory in the download to your plugins directory… not just the files. (Whew! that would have made an ugly mess otherwise!) For the record, this is a common way that plugins are installed. Many authors don’t realize what is simple for them is not always simple for people unfamiliar with their work.

You MUST upload a blank file named sitemap.xml and a blank file named sitemap.x.gz. You can create these files in your favorite text editor and upload them and rename them on the server. The files must be chmod 666 so that the plugin can write to them.

After that, you activate the plugin like any other in WordPress. Be sure to generate the sitemap.

For WordPress MU this gets a bit more involved. WordPress MU doesn’t create directories for each blog in the network, it just uses database calls and .htaccess to provide the data for each site. Herein lies the rub. http://domain.com/sitemap.xml and http://sub.domain.com/sitemap.xml are the same file on WordPress MU domains.

Google makes this a little more annoying by not liking http://sub.domain.com/subdirectory/sitemap.xml at all. Keep this in mind if you have your MU blogs installed in a blog/ directory.

The solution I am working with is before I activate the plugin for any of my sub domain blogs, I upload blogname_sitemap.xml and blogname_sitemap.xml.gz to the web root and chmod 666 them.

Then I activate the plugin and select Manual Location for the sitemap and make sure to edit the filename and path.

Save the settings at the bottom and then go back and generate the sitemap.

Tada! Google Sitemaps now works on WordPress MU!

Once you have this installed, go to Google Sitemaps and add your sites! This will tell you a lot about what Google knows about your sites.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Blog Tools, Blog Plugins, Blog Tips, Howto Blog, WordPress MU, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.