I’ve been meaning for a while to submit the sitemaps for my domains to Google’s Webmaster Central site. Having a sitemap for the googlebot to read improves how your site is crawled, and means only the pages you want are submitted. It has recently also become a format recognised by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, which has resulted in the sitemaps.org site.
Anyway, I looked into how to generate a sitemap, and to be honest it is a bit of a pain for Wordpress users. It seemed like the best way to do it would be to just submit an RSS feed. However, the standard location for your feed isn’t liked by Google, and I didn’t want to move mine. The other methods seemed like too much work as well. So I looked for a Wordpress-based solution, and found Arne Brachold’s Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress plugin.
Very easy to setup and run, all the instructions are there, and only took a few minutes to set up, run, and submit to Google. Perfect tool for the job. It will even ping Google about any changes to your site structure. I’m now getting to read through what Google makes of my site, and for starters get on with fixing a few broken links I didn’t know about.
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