This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
More information what XML-Sitemaps are and how they can help you to get indexed by the major search engines can be found at Sitemaps.org and the searchenginewatch blog.
If you have questions about XML-Sitemaps or run into problems, have a look at my Google Sitemaps FAQ.
Source: Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress v2 Final
I just got finished setting this plugin up on three web sites. Google has been very good to the sites that I manage but I decided to see if I could help Google do a better job by using a sitemap. The key to making Sitemap really useful to Google is to dynamically create a new sitemap every time there is a change to the website and to tell Google that the sitemap has been updated.That is where this plugin comes in.
Two sites were plain WordPress blogs and the third site is a business site with a WordPress blog. The first thing I did was:
- Create a Google Account
- Add my sites
- Verify my sites
The next thing was to create a Sitemap. So I uploaded the Google Sitemap Generator plugin to the plugins directory and activated it. Then I went to the Options page for the Sitemap generator. For the two sites that are only WordPress blogs I accepted the default setup. For the business site with WordPress I needed to make a few changes. I changed the location for the sitemap.xml to put it in the root directory. Then I added the pages that are not part of WordPress before clicking on the Update Options button. Finally I clicked on the Rescan button. All of my scans completed without problems so I went back to my Google account and told it where to find my sitemaps. In about five minutes Google had analyzed my sitemaps.
After Google analyzes your sitemaps you can use its statistics pages. The data presented on the Google pages complement the data available via web statistics programs like Awstats. It will probably take me a week or two to figure out how much this helps or hinders my web sites.