Google Proposes Building XML Sitemaps Into WordPress Core

Google‘s Pascal Birchler, who has been with Google since this past January, but worked at WordPress since 2014 prior to that, published a new project where Google and WordPress want to integrate basic XML Sitemaps in WordPress Core and introduce an XML Sitemaps API to make it fully extendable.

This will make it so WordPress has XML Sitemaps out of the box. Will this replace Yoast? No, in fact, it says “This post proposes integration of XML Sitemaps to WordPress Core as a feature project. The proposal was created as a collaboration between Yoast, Google and various contributors.”

XML Sitemaps will be enabled by default making the following content types indexable

• Homepage
• Posts page
• Core Post Types (Pages and Posts)
• Custom Post Types
• Core Taxonomies (Tags and Categories)
• Custom Taxonomies
• Users (Authors)
• Additionally, the robots.txt file exposed by WordPress will reference the sitemap index.

Here is a diagram:

Seems like John, Gary and friends are excited for this:

This is great! Having a standard sitemap creator sounds like a brilliant idea! https://t.co/kvmEDo8YEh

— Gary “鯨理” Illyes (@methode) June 12, 2019

#sitemaps #xml #ᕙ( • ‿ • )ᕗ https://t.co/ymjrlGTuP1

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) June 12, 2019

Sitemaps … Sitemaps everywhere! ???????? https://t.co/r4SNeUYJud

— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) June 12, 2019

Forum discussion at Twitter.