September 1, 2010 
A new plugin is on the scene that will be of great interest to any WordPress Multisite owner: Google XML Sitemaps with Multisite Support. It is a modified version of Google XML Sitemaps, written by the same developer. Basically, this plugin creates a sitemap for each of your sites and links it in robots.txt.
Why do I need an XML Sitemap?
This is one of the basics of SEO. A sitemap helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. Search engines are better able to crawl through your site with a structured sitemap of where your content leads. This plugin supports all kinds of WordPress-generated pages as well as custom URLs. Whenever you create a new post, it will notify major search engines to come crawl your new content.
Here’s what Google has to say about the importance of having an XML Sitemap:
Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.
Why Sitemaps are Critical for WordPress Sites
Due to the ease of creating and updating content on a WordPress site, you will have regular changes that may not be indexed without a well-structured sitemap.
Google makes it clear what kind of sites will benefit from including an XML sitemap:
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:
- Your site has dynamic content.
- Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
- Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
- Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
This is one free SEO tool that you cannot do without. There’s no excuse now that you can install one single plugin to create sitemaps for your entire network of WordPress sites.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one Sitemaps and complete SEO package for WordPress Multisite, then check out our Sitemaps and SEO – WordPress Multisite Style. Not only does it create sitemaps for all of your sites, but it also adds dynamic keyword and description tags based on post or page content to every post and page on every site. If you’re serious about Multisite SEO, then you don’t want to pass up this all-inclusive tool. It’s specially tailored to put Multisite networks on the grid with Google.
That was great news. It was the last irreplaceable plugin that caused me to delay for two months in shifting to multisite. I shifted last weekend and figured I’d have to spend this weekend hacking the old version.
Plugged it in tonight and it worked perfectly.
So I will have a look at how to clone site settings more easily. Starting with making it easier to add entries to the background sphinx search which was the biggest pain in setting up a sub site.
Btw: thanks for the 12 plugins post as well. The user management one was awesome.
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Not the same developer, darling, for the Standard and the Multisite Support one.
Hi sarah, Thanks for the info, do you know of an alternative (an external service instead of a plugin, or a function) to accomplish this?
I rather use a generator than a plugin I think (to keep my site lean) but don’t want to generate a map manually every time I make a change.
Reg. Mvd
(p.s. have a look at the tabindex of your commentsform!).