[Plugin: WordPress SEO by Yoast] Will Google, et al, find sitemap.xml in ../wp-content/uploads/wpseo

I guess this is a really tough question. ?

How has everyone else been dealing with this hard coded location:

Redirects in .htaccess?
Resetting Google and Yahoo and Bing and … ?
Custom tweaking some code so it puts it under root (or wherever)?
Disabling sitemaps in WordPress SEO and using Google XML Sitemaps?
Something obvious I missed?

On my site a query for domain.com/sitemap.xml automaticly redirects to the generated sitemap.xml in the plugin directory. Google Webmaster Tools etc. also have no problem finding and indexing it. Did you try calling that URL from your browser?

rikmulder,

Thank you for your response. I very much appreciate it.

I’m doing my upgrade testing locally (as I’m jumping several versions) and if I enter https://localhost/fromtheranks/sitemap.xml it comes back with a page not found error. (I can call it as you suggest on my hosted site but the sitemap.xml file is still under root, for the time being, so that would make sense that it works.)

Do you have a redirect going on somewhere? Maybe in .htaccess?

BTW, I am really liking this plugin, other than the hardcoded path.

Is anyone else running into the issue with the hardcoded path to the sitemap.xml file (and its compressed version)?

Acknowledging that it might be right under my nose and I am simply not seeing it, from what I can tell there isn’t any easy place in Yoast’s 0.2.5.2 code to hack this in. Unfortunately I’m not a whiz at .htaccess yet, so if that’s the solution a hint on how to format that would help.

It seems like there are so many search engines out there looking under root as the first place for the sitemap files that there should be a way to point Yoast’s plugin there by default, but I can’t figure out how. ???

As a non-.htaccess guru, would this get me where I want to go (presuming I enter the proper URL of course)?

# CANONICAL SITEMAPS
<IfModule mod_alias.c>
RedirectMatch 301 /sitemap\.xml$ https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/wpseo/sitemap.xml
RedirectMatch 301 /sitemap\.xml\.gz$ https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/sitemap.xml.gz
</IfModule>

This came from digwp.com (Diggning into WP) <– not their fault if I’m misinterpreting and/or misusing it. :o)

you shouldn’t have to do that, the plugin should actually take care of the rewrite by itself, have you tried removing the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz file from your root directory and letting WP handle it?

Hi Joost, I love the plugin, but I do work for another company and manage their 10 to 12 blogs, with the plugin working
I re-build sitemap
and it should be in root/sitemap.xml
https://planobbq.com/sitemap.xml
I click it and its not found
its ending up in
https://planobbq.com/wp-content/uploads/wpseo/sitemap.xml
my tech and I can’t figure how why
any help appreciated
thank you

Are you on Windows hosting? Or what is the reason for the index.php in the URL for posts? It’s causing the sitemap to show here:

https://planobbq.com/index.php/sitemap.xml

I will ask the tech, he’s in Europe and done for the day.
He did ask about index.php also, I will have more info tomorrow thanks
I use all your plugins on my blogs, they are great, and I follow you on twitter, than you Joost.

My pleasure ?? Glad you like it ??

From my tech

Morning , yep it’s htaccess based. the index.php showing up everywhere, when I write the htaccess so everything goes to planobbq instead of https://www.planobbq I’ll do a rerwrite to remove the index.php aswell.seems the php5 is going to bugger alot of people. as alot of olderscripts wont work.

thanks Joost for helping

Thanks a lot, and PHP5 only support will indeed bug some people but they will have to fix it anyway to be able to run WP 3.2 in a few months.

I guess (maybe due to the weather or long hours at work) I’m being particularly dense this week. Not sure how to ask this correctly but let me try it this way:

After installing the plugin when I do a rebuild of the sitemap.xml (and .gz file) it auto puts it in the ../wp-content/uploads/wpseo folder. However.

When Google, et al come looking for it, how are they going to know it is there, in that specific folder, instead of under root which is where they find it now? Without searching the entire site? Which I don’t believe they’re prone to do.

Maybe there is something behind the scenes that WP is doing but other than that possibility, I don’t see how the search engines are going to find it, unless I tell them via a redirect. … What am I missing?

Thanks Joost for what is, my question aside, proving to be a superb plugin.

@ fromtheranks
check your permalinks and .htaccess
that solved our same issue

My tech says

it automatically moves it there, if its not showing check root/index.php/sitemap.xml if it shows up there, change your permalinks and allw wp to edit your htaccess

Interesting. I’ve been developing locally (as I’m upgrading across several versions) using IIS so, based on the above comments, that is why I haven’t seen this phenomenon. I’m still not entirely sure this makes sense to me but I’ll be upgrading my hosted (Apache) site this weekend so I’ll test and report back.

Thanks @bostonstrippers