Conflict with Google XML Sitemap

We have always done XML Sitemaps, it’s been a feature in our plugin for a very long time.

You can dismiss the notice by clicking the X in the top right corner.

Sure but why is the message popping up now telling us that we should disable Google XML Sitemaps? That message wasn’t doing that before so why now?

We’ve added this just like many other plugins, to notify you when you have a plugin that duplicates what All in One SEO does. Many users don’t realize that we have features that they’re using another plugin for and that plugin could be duplicating or conflicting with All in One.

The message is dismissable.

Your text in the on screen message reads this:

Warning: All In One SEO Pack has detected other active SEO or sitemap plugins. We recommend that you deactivate the following plugins to prevent any conflicts:

: Google XML Sitemaps

That’s the first time you’ve done this and you’re telling me that it’s just a message? Nope, not buying it. What you’re doing clearly shows that you’re wanting people to remove the Google XML Sitemaps so that you can have more exposure since your link is in the actual sitemap.

This issue is not resolved – you have caused a major problem for anyone who uses another plugin for sitemaps. Your most recent update enables your sitemap feature by default the old versions didn’t do this so there was no conflict. By enabling it by default you have disabled/demoted all other sitemap plugins – Not Cool!

Hi there, the warning message does not go away, it keeps popping up even if you dismiss it.

Now I don’t think it is a serious issue for SEO for my sites, as I submit the latest sitemap that I create with the Google XML Sitemap to the Sitemaps section of Search Console, so this is the one that should be used by search engines.

However, I would appreciate it if you could provide an option with the next release to disable All-In-One SEO’s sitemap option – I would prefer more internal control over my sitemap setup.

I have to say that your plugin is my first choice for an SEO module, and have used it for many websites, always with excellent results – thank you!

Hi there, another reply. I have read all your documentation (for the first time!) and found the Feature Manager and disabled the sitemap.xml. I then looked for the sitemap link that should have been present from the Google sitemap plugin, and it didn’t exist, which means your plugin must have suppressed that one. By deactivating and reactivating the Google Sitemap plugin, the link appeared (/sitemap.xml)

However, seeing the options now available in your All-in-one SEO plugin with the Sitemap activated, it’s pretty much the same as the other plugin, so I’ll just use yours instead, it gives me enough control, and one less plugin to update!

Thanks again for your excellent module!

Hi there, you can DISABLE the warning message of All In One Seo if you DO NOT want to deactivate Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

[In Left-Side Panel]
All in One SEO >> Feature Manager >> XML Sitemaps >> Deactivate

You’ll no longer see that message.

Note: In case, if you do not want to deactivate XML sitemaps feature by All in One SEO, then you should deactivate the mentioned plugin to avoid conflicts. OR just dismiss the warning as ‘wpsmort’ said above.

This is NOT cool! You activated an *optional* feature by default. You should let users choose, and not force it on them with an upgrade. This caused us SEO problems due to your plugin enabling sitemaps of ALL post-types. Some of which were not to be indexed. You should instead have given a notification that we could enable the Sitemap feature, if you noticed another plugin that had the same functionality. This is the kind of stuff that causes unnecessary headaches.

Dear plugin authors
Kindly disable this sitemap plugin by default. Once I upgraded this plugin to the latest version it crashed my website with a critical error message showing up on the browser. It took me quite a while to resolve it by disabling the sitemap in this plugin.

You should not replace other plugin’s functionality by default. It screwed up my sitemap exposing unwanted loremipsum pages that were hidden before.

@wpsmort Wholeheartedly agree with @zanami, overriding an existing plugin’s behaviour is not an acceptable practice, and is somewhat against the spirit of the repository guidelines (9).

A better practice would be to simply offer the user a choice to disable either the XML Sitemaps Plugin OR the XML Sitemaps Feature of AIO, and provide direct links to both of those actions in the admin message.

A more complete practice would be to detect which plugin is the newly installed one (via the WordPress installation hooks) and set the default behaviour according to that until the user sees the message and makes their own choice.

On a positive note, I love the plugin and always have, and this situation led me to finding the Feature Manager so I could disable the feature until I can determine which plugin is better suited for each client’s site… and in doing so I see a whole bunch of other cool feature extensions I didn’t know about and need to look into! I think you could definitely make these easier to find, and announce new features like this better, as they look really useful (I couldn’t even find instructions in the documentation for turning XML Sitemaps off anywhere.)