Google Sitemap Web Feed WordPress Plugin

To get listed in Google’s search index Google has to know your pages exist. The common way for you to introduce your pages to Google is to patiently wait for Google to come visit and ‘crawl’ your pages, discovering them from links in your blog and from other sites.

Last June Google introduced a new way for webmasters and site owners to help this process by feeding Google an xml formatted sitemap. Google is hoping the new system will help it better gather pages than traditional crawling alone allows. The Google sitemap file also lets site owners indicate how often pages might change and therefor how often those pages should be revisited.

A couple of WordPress plugins have been introduced that automated the creation of the sitemap file. The most robust is Google Sitemap Generator. A new beta version is also available for the brave. If you want to do everything you can to make sure Google knows about your site then this is something you should definitely look at installing.

Feature Highlights:

• WordPress 1.5.1+ and 2.0+ compatible
• Comes as a simple to install WordPress Plugin
• Has a user interface where you can customize all parameters like change frequencies, priorities etc.
• User interface available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese
• Generates a static XML file in your Blog directory (Filename is customizable)
• Can generate a gzipped version of the sitemap
• Generates a sitemap for homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archive pages
• Calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments (You can also turn this off)
• The XML file gets automatically rebuilt if you change/edit/create/publish a post
• Can automatically tell Google about changes via Google-Ping
• You can include external pages which aren’t generated by WordPress or are not recognized by this plugin
• You can define a minimum post priority, which will override the calculated value if it’s too low
• Includes a WordPress filter for other plugins which can add their pages to the sitemap