inspiredbywordpress

Plugin Spotlight: Google XML Sitemaps

There are a lot of Wordpress plug-ins out there that will generate a sitemap for your wordpress, but I honestly believe that this is the best of the lot.  I have tried a lot of them in the past.  Today, I will look more deeply into the best.

So, exactly what does it do?  Well, quite a lot on top of building a a Sitemap.

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Is it easy to use?

If I’m honest, easy to use is an understatement.  Simply install and activate the plugin, and then click the “Rebuild the Sitemap” button in order to create your first sitemap, although this does take a while to build initially, from here on it is zero maintenance.

This, though, is just the default configuration.  In order to do anything more than just notify Google of updates and create your sitemap you need to configure the plug-in options.  You will need to configure it to notify Bing (formerly MSN Live Search, which was formerly MSN Search) or Ask Jeeves you will need to configure the plug-in.  Further, in order to integrate it with Yahoo search you will need to get a Yahoo developers key.

In order to truly give the best user experience they should enable all of this for you, creating a truly quick and easy user friendly install.

Does it work as expected?

Does it work as expected? Yes. If you want to see what it churns out, take a look at the Inspired By Wordpress sitemap which was generated by this plugin.

I can’t really pick a fault in the functionality of this plugin. It seems to work perfectly.

Conclusion

A pretty awesome plugin all in all. I can’t find any real fault in it, once set up you can just leave it to do it’s own thing. It’s not a complex plug-in in the slightest. Once it is set up it is quite literally set-and-forgett. Do you have any thoughts? Any alternatives? Let me know!