Google Sitemaps are an interesting new web technology. In the past, it seems as if all webmasters had to communicate with search engines was the robots.txt file. Sitemaps instead provide an XML interface to inform web crawlers to examine valid URLs with priority and modification date.

In order to get everything to play together, I’ve used a Wordpress Plugin and a Gallery2 Module to build my sitemaps then tied together with the following sitemapindex.xml file:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.joeyhagedorn.com/sitemap-wp.xml</loc>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.joeyhagedorn.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_view=sitemap.Sitemap</loc>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>


The key was configuring the Wordpress Plugin to write its file at sitemap-wp.xml but ping google at the location of the sitemapindex.xml file. I also had to hack the Gallery2 module to write the correct URLs, and setup a rewrite rule such that google would see the gallery2 sitemap at the correct root… Anyway, i think it works now, hopefully some more visitors will find my site helpful.