XML sitemap not pointing to new author slug

In some cases, (Tested on a different site) I get a 404 for the https://www.website.com/author-sitemap.xml

Where exactly is it generating the wrong URL? Do you have an example URL?

Hi Brandon,
The 404 error is generated when we click on https://www.website.com/author-sitemap.xml link generated from the sitemap.xml file by All In One SEO plugin

I do have an example site, can I send it to you privately?

Hi Fanaticweb,

Are you expecting https://example.com/author-sitemap.xml to be https://example.com/members-sitemap.xml? If so, I think that’s a misunderstanding of what my plugin, and All in One SEO Pack do. Looking at the code for All in One SEO Pack, it looks like user URLs should correctly use the “members” slug rather than “author.” If that’s not the case, then that’s one thing. As for https://example.com/author-sitemap.xml, that should not change. It’s a URL meant for search engines/web crawlers, and it ultimately doesn’t matter if the URL is “members” versus “author,” as long as the content inside is correct.

Hey Brandon,
What I meant is:

When All in One SEO generates the sitemap, it outputs the file here: https://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

In that https://www.website.com/sitemap.xml file, we see the different links to the sections that are generated and among them is the https://www.website.com/author-sitemap.xml

In some cases (tested on multiple sites using the same themes and plugins), when I click on https://www.website.com/author-sitemap.xml I get a 404 error.

In other cases, it will load the author-sitemap.xml file but all I see is the Admin user listed in that file and not the rest of contributors as it should be.

Basically this is what is generated in the https://www.website.com/author-sitemap.xml
https://website.com/member/admin/

@fanaticweb AIOSEOP dev here. I unfortunately don’t have any time to look into this (possible) conflict at the moment, but the author sitemap index will only return a 404 error if the plugin couldn’t generate any entries for it. That means there’s likely something that this plugin does that conflicts with our code.

No problem Arnaud, I will be doing more testing on my end while including/excluding Edit Author Slug as well as the themes (maintheme/childtheme) involved to help narrow it down and report back on here.

Hi @fanaticweb,

I was able to test Edit Author Slug and AIOSEOP together. While I was able to reproduce what you are seeing, it’s not something that’s an issue or conflict with either plugin. AIOSEOP will only output an author URL in the author-sitemap.xml file if a user is the listed author of a post. If the a user doesn’t have published posts, then their author URL will not be output in the sitemap. If no users have published posts, then, as @arnaudbroes mentioned above, the author-sitemap.xml will result in a 404.

Thanks Brandon, makes perfect sense, the only thing is, those users are set to the “Contributors” role by default upon registration, the theme is a Classified ads theme allowing users to register and submit ads individually, therefore they are authors of their own posts, or should I say custom post types given the theme uses custom taxonomy for the Ads, furthermore, using the Members plugin, I could verify that the Contributor role has the Read/Publish/Delete Posts and publish_blocks capabilities.

Besides, I’m only experiencing the 404 issue on one site, which is probably an isolated case, yet the other sites I’m only getting the Admin in the /author-sitemap.xml

Could it be the role “Contributor” that is not defined as a qualified post owner in the theme? Or the fact that the theme is using custom post types yet I’m using the free version of AIOS which has it’s limits when it comes to Custom Post Types?

Hi @fanaticweb,

It’s not about whether or not they can author a post, it’s whether or not they have authored a post. If a user doesn’t have any posts attributed to them—meaning, their user ID is the one used in the post_author column of the post row in the database—then they will not show up in the author-sitemap.xml. Also, I should note that, it has to be a post post type. AIOSEOP doesn’t look for custom post types when it comes to the author-sitemap.xml. You can see it here https://github.com/awesomemotive/all-in-one-seo-pack/blob/caecc441411a4812f036afe0df72f70668c0b430/modules/aioseop_sitemap.php#L4542

Understood, thank you so much Brandon for the deep clarifications and pointers, I cross referenced the DB, looked into the dbname_users and saw the assigned ID’s for each user, then went into dbname_posts and saw all the author_posts assigned to the Admin (1) as well as the other author_posts associated to the users and attached to their individual posts (Ads) and attachments, so this at least clears the path for the Contributors being the actual post authors of the posts.

I believe this thread is resolved as far as the Edit Author Slug is concerned.

@arnaudbroes does the Pro version of AIOS allow the indexing of authors with published custom post types?
Should I create a new thread under the AIOS support forum?

@fanaticweb that should be possible even with the free version, but yes, I’d suggest you create a new thread under our support forum so one of our support technicians can look into this for you.

Thanks Arnaud, will do so, and thank you again Brandon for your extended support, I will mark this thread as resolved.