Submit your sitemap to search engines

Our plugin can create sitemaps for the various sections of your website. That makes it easier for search engines to understand your site structure. We combine all of the individual sitemaps into a sitemap index. This means you only have to submit the sitemap index link which is automatically updated as you add, remove, or change your content. The same sitemap index is used by our add-ons like Yoast SEO: News and Yoast SEO: Local.

If you haven’t enabled our sitemaps, please follow these steps first and, if needed, customize your sitemap index for your website needs.

Google Search Console

Google is our preferred search engine. If you haven’t added your website to Google Search Console, please follow these steps first.

How to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console

How to remove your sitemap from Google Search Console

If you made a mistake submitting the sitemap_index.xml file or if you need to remove some other sitemap, you can delete it and re-submit it. Doing so is not expected to hurt the SEO of your site.

1. Sign in to Google Search Console.
2. In the sidebar, select your website.
   
3. Click on ‘Sitemaps’.
   The ‘Sitemaps’ menu item is under the ‘Index’ section. If you do not see ‘Sitemaps’, click on ‘Index’ to expand the section.
   
4. Under ‘Submitted sitemaps’, click on the sitemap you want to remove.
   
5. Click on the 3 vertical dots in the top-right of the page then Remove Sitemap.  If needed, you can then re-add the sitemap here.
   

How to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools no longer accepts sitemap submissions. Please use the new Google Search Console.

Bing Webmaster Tools

If you haven’t added your website to Bing Webmaster Tools, please follow these steps first.

1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. On the My Sites page, select your website.
3. In the left sidebar, click Configure My Site and then Sitemaps.
4. Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps like http://example.com/sitemap.xml
5. Enter your sitemap URL into the text box at the top. Your sitemap URL will look like something like this: http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml.
6. Click Submit.

Yandex Webmaster

If you haven’t added your website to Yandex, please follow these steps first.

1. Sign in to Yandex Webmaster.
2. On the home page, select your website.
3. In the left sidebar, click Indexing Options and then Sitemap files.
4. Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps like http://example.com/sitemap.xml
5. Enter your sitemap URL into the text box at the top. Your sitemap URL will look like something like this: http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml.
6. Click Add.

Other search engines

Yahoo site explorer was replaced by Bing Webmaster Tools.

Ask.com no longer accepts sitemap submissions.

Pinging search engines

After you have manually connected the sitemaps to Bing and Google, each time a post is updated Yoast will then automatically ping the search engines to have them come crawl the sitemap.

This filter can be used to disable all pinging for all search engines. It would go into the functions.php. If you are not sure how or where to add the code, your host provider or theme developer can help.

add_filter ('wpseo_allow_xml_sitemap_ping', '__return_false');

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