Arne Brachhold

Google announced yesterday a new tool for webmasters. The Google Sitemaps! You can submit you sitemap to Google and allow them to find all your pages without crawling every link. You can read more about this cool feature at searchenginewatch.com.

I created a small php file which will do the generation of the sitemap in a Google compliant format for you. At the moment, only posts, home page and static pages are supported. If you have better knowledge of WordPress than me, feel free to modify the script and include category pages etc.

Every URL in the sitemap may have a priority which represents the page priority on your website. My script calculates the it on the number of comments. This should be ok for most blogs, maybe i will add the post date to priority generation later.

Installation is easy! Just download the sitemap.php and place it in your blog directory. Then tell Google Sitemaps the URL and all should be fine

If you want you can alter the default configuration for various settings like the change frequenty of posts etc. Just have a look at the top of the php file.

I’ve tested it on this site ( WP1.5.1.1 ) and with a XML Schema validator. If you find an error or if it doesn’t work on your site, please drop me a mail or write a comment and I will have a look at your site.

UPDATE:
I included support for archive pages. Just download the new version 1.1 again.
Archive pages will have a predefined priority which can be customized.

UPDATE 2:
It get’s allmost complete
Added support for categorie pages. They will also habe a predefined priority which can be customized.
Download the current version at the links above.

Suggestions / Todo
- Autogenerate priority of categories (maybe by postcount?)
- Use correct lastMod in categories and archives (find last post)

UPDATE 3:
Check the beta of the new version at Google Sitemap Generator v2 (BETA) which comes as a WordPress Plugin and a grahpical administration page!