Google sitemaps + Wordpress....My Dilemma
 

This may not be an issue but I was wondering if I could get some feedback from you folks.

Basically what we've been doing is logging into wordpress on say Monday morning, and writing 7 posts for a blog, and setting it to publish one post per day.

The problem here is that as soon as you "publish" the post the google sitemap plugin for wordpress adds that post to your sitemap.
So does google think my site only updates on Monday? Or does it not read the posts until they're published on the front page?

I really don't want to login to every blog every day and publish a post, but if doing it the other way hurts us with google I may have no choice.

Does anyone here have any information on this?

Hi lenny2, you can edit the time stamp in each post you do -- just schedule some posts ahead

We do that. It still doesn't keep them from being added to the sitemap right away though

I'd like to know the answer to this too

I'm not 100% sure - but as far as I know Google will only see what a surfer can see.

Scrub that - if you have SE friendly urls then I guess the Google sitemap plugin would tell Google about them - even if they cant be reached from the site directly.

In other words - I dont know.

It might be something that has been covered in the updates to the plugin - it sounds like a reasonable question.

bump

5678

Lenny do you have a public ICQ number?

78465690

what google sitemap plugin are you using?

Does the sitemap show the date that the post will be published? If so, you may just be giving them a heads up.

Will have to play with that as never noticed it before.

When AutoBlogger Pro builds my Google Sitemaps, it has a different modified date/time on each post, even though they're all syndicated roughly around the same time.

You can probably modify your code to do something similar.

use wp-cron. http://www.skippy.net/blog/plugins/

We already have that. What does it have to do with the sitemap plugin?
I should use it to rebuild the sitemap and add posts to it that are already there?

From my experience, you cant even view post dated posts until the date they are published. I have tried, at least on our sites, you can't, which leads me to believe that google can't either.

Try it, write up a post and date it for next thursday, then try to view it.

you can always hire someone to tweak it, so it doesn't add it to the sitemap untill the articles are actually published...

^ probably your best bet :2 cents:

That's possible.
Probably easier than what someone suggested to me earlier which was to have a vbscript written that would login to the admin every day and publish a draft.

Of course "IF" the post is unviewable by a surfer or by googlebot before the publish date then this isn't an issue at all really. I guess we're just 404'ing the google bot until the post goes live.

Heya Lenny. This is easy to find out. Grab a url of a future post from the sitemap, and see what happens, I can almost guaranty that it will display.

It won't 404.

An easy fix would be to disable the sitemapper, and cron the site map build.

One possibility is to add the urls that you DON'T want Google to publish in your robots.txt file and then delete the urls once they are published.

According to Google, your robots.txt file overrides the sitemap.xml file so any conflicts -- it "believes" your robots.txt file.

Obviously, a quickie script would help manage this. Not the best solution but if all else fails, in theory, it should work.

I appreciate all the feedback.
However all of the solutions we've seen thus far are more complicated than just logging in daily and publishing a draft.

Maybe we need a wordpress plugin to write sitemaps that only reads what's actually displayed on all of the site's pages instead of everything that's been "published" from within the admin.

Are you setting your posts to publish with a later date? Try just saving them. Don't click publish, I think that's where the problem may be.

Yes we edit the timestamp so that they won't show up on the site until a later date. However if we don't click "publish" they'll never show up on the site. If we just save them as drafts we have to log back in on the day they're supposed to go up and publish them then.

We try to automate things as much as possible so I don't have to be married to my sites. I can do my work when I'm working and then if I want to take a few days to go get some R&R I don't ahve to worry about things.

Like I said I'm just wondering if the adding all the posts to the sitemap at once hurts us with google because they may think we only add 7 posts on monday or 30 posts on the 1st of the month instead of one post each day.

BTW I thought this was a problem with the sitemapper built into Autobloggerpro....but it turns out the regular google sitemap plugin for wordpress does the same thing.

If your coder could tweak the sitemap plugin to only add posts as they're displayed on the site that would give us a great reason to use ABP on all of our sites. :winkwink: