[wpmonkey]

I am not seeing individual business listings (i.e. http://mydomain.com/directory-of-businesses/name/business1/) in the sitemap created by the Yoast SEO plugin.

Other plugins that I’ve used, such as an event plugin, has a reference of each individual post within the site map.

I understand that you have stated on other tickets that “If the directory home page is in the sitemap, which is should be, the directory will be properly indexed by search engines.” but what I’m saying is that there is an expectation that more than parent directory listing page be listed, and that in fact it is rather important that each individual listing (post) is included in the xml sitemap for indexing and SEO.

I’m not finding those, or am I missing something?

Thanks

[Steven Zahm]

@ Stacy

re: I’m not finding those, or am I missing something?

Nope, not missing anything. if the directory home page is in your sitemap, Google will crawl and index the directory pages. There is nothing to worry about. Concentrate on making quality content for your site that is always fresh and Google will reward your site for doing so in the index.

[wpmonkey]

Yes, but we want each business listing indexed, and I’m not seeing those listed in the sitemap, which would be good SEO practices.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Stacy

re: Yes, but we want each business listing indexed, and I’m not seeing those listed in the sitemap, which would be good SEO practices.

This is what I am saying, they will be indexed. The only page that is required for the sitemap is the directory home page.

[wpmonkey]

We’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Best practices for SEO are to include all of the business listing pages, especially since they have unique URLs, in the sitemap.xml. Other, similar plugins, do this.

If I could put that in as a feature request, that would be greatly appreciated.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Stacy

It’s on my feature request list already, promise :). I have real major concerns about even attempting to add it because I do have many users which have hundreds of thousands of entries and such a system is not scalable to those numbers, easily. When I do add this, I will first test to see how Yoast handles it… I suspect Yoast simply does not include that many posts/pages in the sitemap or worse, just crashes because the server does not have enough resources to handle it. It’ll be interesting to learn.

Like I’ve mentioned Google will index the entries just fine, I’ve gone thru great lengths to ensure it does and that is what is truly important. By far the most important thing is that your site has quality content, kept fresh as that is the most important factor for your site rank in the index. If you do not have that, it does not matter what the sitemap contains or does not contain.

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