Yoast SEO Sitemap in WordPress: A Complete Guide

Yoast SEO Sitemap in WordPress is a powerful tool that helps search engines like Google understand your website's structure and content.

Yoast SEO Sitemap is a feature that comes with the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, which is used by millions of website owners worldwide.

The Yoast SEO Sitemap feature is activated by default, but you can also manually enable it from the plugin's settings.

This feature helps search engines crawl your website more efficiently and improves your website's visibility in search engine results.

An XML sitemap is an .xml file that lists a website's URLs and provides additional metadata about each, such as last update, update frequency, and relative importance.

Search engines like Google and Bing use sitemaps to supplement their regular operations and learn from the metadata they provide. This helps crawlers explore your site more intelligently.

A sitemap tells search engines which pages and files you think are important in your site, and provides valuable information about these files. This information helps search engines understand your site's content and structure.

Here are some benefits of sitemaps:

To set up a Yoast SEO sitemap in WordPress, you'll need to use the Yoast SEO plugin, which is a must-have for many developers.

The process is straightforward and shouldn't give you any trouble generating your XML sitemap. You can create, validate, and submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.

A sitemap is a tool to improve your site's SEO, providing a structured list of crawlable pages. They can be especially beneficial for large websites where it can be challenging to ensure internal linking for all pages and posts.

You can customize your Yoast sitemap by turning search engine indexing on or off for different types of content through the "Search Appearance" menu within Yoast.

To do this, look for the "Y" Yoast icon in the left-hand dashboard menu and click it. Then, click on "Search Appearance" and access the "Content Types" tab.

You can enable or disable indexing by toggling "Yes" or "No" under "Show Posts in search results?" for each Content Type. For example, you can toggle this to "no" to apply noindex tags to all pieces of content within that Content Type and remove them from the XML sitemap.

Here's a quick rundown of the steps to customize your Yoast sitemap:

After making all of your changes, you can view your sitemap at yourdomainname.com/sitemap_index.xml.

Having a sitemap is a technical SEO best practice, and it's especially useful for WordPress sites with complex structures.

A sitemap helps search engines discover URLs on your WordPress site, assisting them in crawling your content and understanding when pages have been updated.

It acts as a guide to your site, helping Google discover your pages faster.

Sitemaps are especially beneficial for large websites with 500+ pages, where ensuring internal linking can be a challenge.

They also help search engines understand your content's relevance better, with metadata providing additional information about each URL, such as the last modification date and its relative importance.

Having a sitemap can also help identify errors, such as broken links and missing pages, that reduce search engine visibility.

Here are some benefits of sitemaps:

Sitemaps can also report errors and issues robots encounter while crawling your website, helping you identify problems that reduce search engine visibility.

Having an XML sitemap is not mandatory, but it's a recommended practice for WordPress sites, especially those with complex structures or many pages.

To create your Yoast SEO sitemap, log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and hover over the Yoast SEO logo on the left-hand sidebar. Click General and then scroll down to the APIs subsection, where you'll find the XML Sitemaps option. Click the Enable feature button to automatically create a sitemap, which should be located at yourdomainname.com/sitemap_index.xml.

The sitemap will break down into multiple sitemaps for different types of content, such as posts and pages. Yoast SEO also follows best practices by adding a link to your XML sitemap in the robots.txt file, breaking up large sitemaps into smaller ones, and including image information and a "lastmod" date for each URL.

To submit your sitemap to Google, log in to your Search Console property at search.google.com and click on the "Sitemaps" menu item. Copy your sitemap URL (yourdomainname.com/sitemap_index.xml) and paste it into the field below "Add a new sitemap." Hit submit, and you'll see a message from Search Console that says "Sitemap submitted successfully."

Creating a WordPress sitemap is a straightforward process that can be completed in just a few steps. To start, you'll need to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and hover over the Yoast SEO logo on the left-hand sidebar.

Clicking on the "General" tab will take you to the Site features section, where you can enable the XML Sitemaps option. This will automatically create a sitemap for your website.

Your sitemap should be located at yourdomainname.com/sitemap_index.xml. You can also view it by clicking on the "View the XML sitemap" button in the Yoast SEO settings.

The Yoast SEO plugin breaks down your sitemap into multiple sitemaps for different types of content, such as posts and pages.

Some of the benefits of using the Yoast SEO plugin include:

If you're not using the Yoast SEO plugin, you can still generate a WordPress sitemap with a specialized sitemap plugin, such as the XML Sitemap Generator for Google.

To submit your website to search engines, you'll need to verify your site with Google Search Console first. Log in to your Search Console property at search.google.com, and if you haven't already, verify your site.

You'll then need to click on the "Sitemaps" menu item on the left-hand side of the Search Console navigation. This is where you'll add your sitemap URL, which should be in the format of yourdomainname.com/sitemap_index.xml.

Copy and paste this URL into the field below "Add a new sitemap", and hit submit. You'll see a message from Search Console that says "Sitemap submitted successfully."

Google can take time, even several days, to process your sitemap. Once indexed, the "Sitemap" report should show a green "Success" status.

You can also submit your sitemap to Bing, which can speed up the process of search engine bots discovering and crawling your site.

WordPress vs HTML sitemaps serve different purposes. WordPress XML sitemaps are meant for search engines, not users.

XML sitemaps are invisible to website visitors. HTML sitemaps, on the other hand, are for users and display a hierarchical list of selected pages on your site.

A typical HTML sitemap is like a table of contents that helps users navigate your content.

You can disable Google indexing on a WordPress site for various reasons, such as keeping an invite-only website private or testing web development skills without traffic.

There are also instances where you might want to disable Google indexing, like when you're testing your web development skills and want to avoid traffic.

To do this, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin, which has a feature to disable Google indexing on a WordPress site.

Disabling Google Indexing on WordPress can be a lifesaver if you want to keep your invite-only website private or avoid traffic while testing your web development skills. You can do this by using a plugin like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack, which allows you to control how your site appears in search engine results.

Wanting to disable Google indexing is a common reason for wanting to keep your site private, whether it's for a new business or a personal project. This can help prevent unwanted traffic and attention.

To disable Google indexing, you'll need to access your WordPress site's settings and look for the section on search engine visibility. From there, you can toggle off the option to allow search engines to crawl and index your site.

If you're not comfortable using a plugin or tweaking your site's settings, you can also consider using a robots.txt file to block Google's indexing. This will tell search engines to leave your site alone and not crawl it.

Disabling Google indexing can be a temporary solution for testing or keeping your site private, but it's essential to remember that it won't make your site completely invisible.

A single sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs, but breaking them up into smaller ones makes them speedy and efficient.

Yoast SEO splits up large XML sitemaps to keep them fast, with each sitemap holding up to 1,000 URLs and connected to ensure they work together seamlessly.

Breaking up large data into smaller chunks can greatly improve its performance, making it easier to handle and manage.

This approach helps to prevent data overload and ensures that your website's XML sitemaps remain fast and efficient, even with a large number of URLs.

To review your XML sitemap, go to General -> Site Features and scroll to the bottom of the page.

You'll see the XML Sitemaps box and the button to View the XML Sitemap, which will take you to the main XML sitemap at yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml.

The main XML Sitemap is a list of all XML sitemaps produced by the plugin, with each item producing a list of URLs specific to that content type.

If you discover missing content or find content that should not be present, you need to return to the Content Types section of the plugin and review what you have active.

Changing the visibility settings of each content type will turn the individual XML sitemaps on or off.