Skip to main content
Rankify > Settings > Sitemaps

​
XML sitemaps

​
toggle
default:"on"
Generates a paginated sitemap index at /sitemap.xml, split per post type and taxonomy, that stays current automatically.Replaces the core WordPress sitemap when enabled, so you do not end up with two.
Generating a sitemap tells nobody it exists. Submit https://example.com/sitemap.xml in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Until you do, this setting is doing much less than you think.
​
select
default:"Leave it out"
Whether pages marked noindex appear in the sitemap.Leave it out. Listing a page you have told search engines not to index sends a contradictory signal, and it is one of the most common mistakes in SEO configuration.
​
toggle
default:"off"
Pro. Publishes a Google News sitemap for articles from the last 48 hours.Only useful for sites approved in Google News. Enabling it without approval does nothing.
​
toggle
default:"off"
Pro. Detects videos in your content and publishes a video sitemap with duration, thumbnail, and description, so they can appear in video results.

​
What goes in the sitemap

Each selected type gets its own sitemap file, listed in the index at /sitemap.xml.
​
checkboxes
default:"posts and pages"
Which post types are listed.
​
checkboxes
default:"categories"
Which taxonomy archives are listed.
​
toggle
default:"on"
Lists the featured image and any images in the content, so they can appear in image search.
Types set to noindex or disabled on the Content Types tab are left out automatically. You never have to keep two lists in agreement.
A sitemap is a list of pages you want indexed, not an inventory of every URL. Leaving out tag archives and date archives makes it a stronger signal, not a weaker one.

​
Crawling

​
toggle
default:"on"
Serves a robots.txt generated by Rankify, including a link to your sitemap and any AI crawler rules.Nothing is written to disk. Deactivate Rankify and the rules stop applying, leaving nothing behind.
A physical robots.txt file on disk always wins. If your rules are not appearing, check whether one exists in your site root, because WordPress cannot override it.

​
Additional rules

​
textarea
Extra directives appended to the served robots.txt, one per line.
Lines that are not valid robots.txt directives are dropped, so a stray paste cannot corrupt the file.
​
preview
Exactly what your robots.txt returns right now, including the sitemap reference and AI crawler rules. Check this after any change.
robots.txt is the fastest way to remove a site from search. A stray Disallow: / takes everything out. Read the served output after every edit, and if you are not certain what a rule does, do not add it.
robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. A page blocked here can still appear in results if other sites link to it, but with no description, because the crawler was never allowed to read it. To keep a page out of results, use noindex on the Content Types tab and leave it crawlable.

​
Checking your work

1

Open the sitemap

Visit https://example.com/sitemap.xml. You should see an index linking to one file per type.
2

Open robots.txt

Visit https://example.com/robots.txt. It should reference your sitemap.
3

Submit both

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Search Console then reports what it actually indexed, which is the number that matters rather than what you listed.