I’ve been busy creating sitemaps for all of my websites. I’ve been reading about Google Sitemaps and how if you provide a complete sitemap to them, it will help the webcrawler (the thing that views each webpage) index you website(s) more thoroughly. I found a cool plugin (download, called Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress) to use with WordPress (the software that runs this blog). The plugin will recreate a sitemap for the entire blog everytime a new post is created…plus it will notify google that a new sitemap has been created! I think that’s pretty cool. Here is a full list of features from the website:

Features:
  • WordPress 2 compatible

  • Comes as a WordPress Plugin

  • Is easy to install

  • Has a user interface where you can customize all parameters like change frequencies, priorities etc.

  • User interface available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese

  • Generates a static XML file in your Blog directory (Filename is customizable)

  • Can generate a gzipped version of the sitemap

  • Generates a sitemap for homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archive pages

  • Calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments (You can also turn this off)

  • The XML file gets automatically rebuilt if you change/edit/create/publish a post

  • Can automatically tell Google about changes via Google-Ping

  • You can include external pages which aren’t generated by WordPress or are not recognized by this plugin

  • You can define a minimum post priority, which will override the calculated value if it’s too low

  • Includes a WordPress filter for other plugins which can add their pages to the sitemap