Google Sitemaps

A Google sitemap is an XML format file that can be used to tell the Google, MSN and Yahoo search engines about the structure of your site. Google introduced it in 2005 and it helps a lot of smaller sites get their first foothold in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

For Wordpress users there’s a neat little plugin that generates the sitemap automatically and even pings the Google search engine to tell it to come and have a look at its handiwork.

One problem that often arises for first time users is that the plugin cannot get permission to write the sitemap.xml and the GZ compressed sitemap.xml.gz files in the first place. There’s a very simple workaround to this if you see any write errors when you hit the “rebuild sitemap” button.

First create two empty files in notepad with the names sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz. Next, upload them using FTP to the Wordpress root folder for your site. Then, change the read-write permissions using the Unix command CHMOD (often available as a right-click menu item in your FTP program (it is in WS_FTP, anyway) to 666 (yes, we know very devilish of us). Now run the sitemap generator again. Success will come within seconds, hopefully. Finally, use CHMOD once again on those two files to change to a more secure setting - a maximum of 644 should be safe.

Now, check your logs for slurping spiders and googling bots and just hope that the XML has worked its magic on your site.

Of course, these XML sitemaps are not really aimed at human viewers, so don’t bother linking to the file on your site. Most CMS systems and blogging software has in built tools for producing nice maps of your site with neat and appealing links. Check the documentation.