1.1 What makes WordPress built-in Sitemap so Important?
WordPress 5.5 introduced sitemaps that will help your site, they’re so good in fact we rushed to add a link to the sitemap to our plugin search engine optimization redirect editor. Not only does WordPress 5.5 out of the box make great sitemaps you can submit to Google search console, they don’t put the noindex sitemap mark on their sitemaps. This is a problem with many SEO plugins, and we are thrilled to see that WordPress is not doing that.
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap to put it simply lists all links on your site of posts, pages, etc. WordPress has also made it visually nice to look at in case a human is looking at your sitemap. This let’s search engines know what they should be indexing and where to go.
SEO plugins already have this, what makes WordPress sitemap so important?
Yes, many plugins, some of the most popular have sitemaps that are damaging your rankings in Google Search as we have discussed in great detail over the years. These search engines add in a header called no-index, which says don’t look at this, essentially so Google doesn’t look at the sitemap.
The sitemap provided by WordPress does not do this, however some SEO plugins are already redirecting you back to their sitemap, so while you may go to the correct link, you may get a bad sitemap due to the plugin you’re using.
Anyone who says no-index on sitemaps is good either hasn’t done all the research we have along with others or is monetarily incentivized to deny facts.
We encourage you to use the sitemaps made by WordPress, and as always please update your WordPress and keep it up-to-date along with all plugins and themes.
