Google Sitemaps Generator Plugin

Getting back into blogging again after a year or more break has been made a lot more interesting by the huge number of cool plugins that users are submitting to the spartacus s9y plugin site. Spartacus in itself needs a seperate blog entry really being the cool bundle of cool that it is! Anyway for now this entry's about the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin (GSG).

Google Sitemaps are a way for webmasters to get their content indexed by Google more quickly and efficiently. Using the sitemap protocol, webmasters can outline what content is contained on their site and where Google can expect to find that content. This way Google should be able to index a sitemapped website quicker.

There are various ways to create a sitemap ranging from doing it by hand in a text editor or more easily by having the sitemap created automatically for you by a script. Once the sitemap is ready it can be submitted to Google online ready for Google to verify the sitemap and then crawl your site.

All of this is good, except every time the site changes the sitemap becomes outdated. However the Google Sitemap Generator plugin counters that problem. The GSG plugin acts on the publish and save event hooks, so that any time you publish or save an article, the GSG plugin works in the background to create an updated map of all the published content on the site. The plugin even 'pings' Google to let it know that the sitemap has changed, making new content on your site get listed on Google quicker. Ace!

I'd love to give credit to the author but all I know or can find out about him is his name is Boris. Anway, thanks a load Boris :)

EDIT: As I saved this entry the sitemap was generated successfully!:



An important note - you do still have to submit the sitemap manually for the first time - a note appears at the top of the s9y editing screen saying: If you have not submited your sitemap to google, do it now with visiting this link. The 'link' seems to be customized to submit the sitemap to google automatically... let's click it... ok yes it goes to the Google webmaster tools site where you have to submit the sitemap manually the first time. All done! Hopefully that'll make it easier for Google to spider the articles.