fromtheranks

avantime,

Hi. Sorry for the late response but got tied up at work. No, I did not create a robots.txt file; never had one as far as I know (or a need for one).

Via Google Webmaster tools, I resubmitted my site on 4/17 after all the changes and it took them a couple of days to scan it (on 4/19). The only problems were a couple of missing/erroneous images. Other than that …

As a side-bar, when I clicked on the “See Sitemap” link that link came back right away with a display of my new sitemap.xml file so I was pretty sure then that Google would find it.

Hope this helps.

I’ll be darned. I don’t know exactly how it does it (at least not yet) but after finishing the upgrade to WP3.1.1 on https://www.fromtheranks.com I updated pages and posts to ensure the SEO portion was correct, went to the Google Webmaster tools and … I’ll be darned if Google didn’t find the sitemap.xml file without any prompting or redirecting on my part … even though it was “buried” in the ../wp-content/uploads/wpseo folder.

Thank you Yoost for a great plugin!

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

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.

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)

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. ???

tff,

Thank you for this fix. It works very nicely. The only “gotcha” was that after it was fixed realizing I had to click on the “Compare Delete” hyperlink to toggle back and forth between Compare and Delete. As this wasn’t working initially, I ignored the hyperlink.

Thanks also to dd32 for a great plugin, which plays nicely with WP3.1.1 once the fix is in place.

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.

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?

Agreed. Could easily be a variable in wp-simple-archive-sitemap.php.

Thank you for the tip. I just ran into this. Clearly not yet fixed.

Follow-up from the troubleshooting link:

1. Checked the _options table and “active_plugins” is set to “a:0:{} so this doesn’t apply
2. There’s no plugins installed at all so the “known plugins that will mess you up” list doesn’t apply
3. The “Windows Servers” section has possibilities, even though I’m on IIS 5.x and not 6 or 7. Nevertheless I downloaded and installed the suggested plugin:

Permalink Fix & Disable Canonical Redirects Pack

And … that fixed it! I now have a home page again! There are a bunch of other issues but at least I can see them now.

Thank you esmi!

Thanks, esmi. I’ll check out the Troubleshooting link and get back to you.

Thank you. But. With all due respect. That doesn’t really answer my question.

Someone built in all of the advanced features for a reason, so it seems to me that we ought to know something about using them without guessing. Yes?

Thanks in advance.

I sort of get the impression that Skullbit isn’t supporting this anymore (or maybe he has gotten really really busy in the last year), so maybe someone who is really sharp on this stuff can suggest a hack. ?