I use Google Sitemap Generator to prepare my XML (non-human-readable) sitemaps for submission to the search engines and to ping them. This review is based on version 3.2.4, available on the WordPress website.
You pretty much just have to install and activate this plugin. As standard, it will write a normal sitemap.xml file, and a gzipped (compressed) version which will normally be taken by the search engines which is given the name sitemap.xml.gz. The plugin will automatically notify Google, Bing and Ask about your new content whenever you add a new post, and it will also notify Yahoo! if you have an application ID which are available for free.
You can define additional pages to include in your sitemap, and you can specify broadly the factors involved in calculating the priority of each post.
In the event that the location of your sitemap on the file system is not properly detected, you can specify it manually, but I have never had any trouble with the plugin identifying the right location. However, this can be useful, especially if you are using a multi-blog system such as WP Hive.
You can indicate the content you want included in your sitemap; any categories, posts or pages that are to be excluded from the sitemap; the frequency the sitemap should indicate that each page should be polled; and the individual priorities of each type of page.
Personally, I would rather not fiddle too much behind the hood. You can change the settings as you wish, but unless you really know SEO well and know what you are trying to achieve, you probably won’t achieve anything useful. It is good to know that the ability to exclude pages and posts is present, especially if you intend to hide pages from the search engines. Otherwise this plugin pretty much falls naturally into the category of set-and-forget for me.
There are many other XML sitemap generators available. If you have used this one or any others, let us know what you think!
