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WordPress.com Bugged XML Sitemaps

Tuesday, 17 June 2008

WordPress.com has added XML sitemaps so I thought I would take a glance at their implementation.

My immediate though was to take a look at Lorelle's sitemap.xml

  • Homepage daily priority
  • Every other page updated on a weekly basis?

That seems like a good way to tell the spiders to index your site less often than they currently do.

With Lorelle you would certainly want spiders checking the home page hourly as she is sometimes the source of breaking news.

Then I looked at the sitemap with a little more detail, and in particular the entry for her most recent post, the Cyclical Nature of Blog Stats - a post worthy of a link anyway so this is a 2-in-1.

This entry was written by Lorelle VanFossen and posted on June 16, 2008 at 4:57 am

Ah but I know Lorelle writes posts sometimes in batches and schedules them for publishing. Lets look at the XML

<loc>http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/the-cyclical-nature-of-blog-stats/</loc>
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.6</priority>

		<lastmod>2008-06-11T18:59:24+00:00</lastmod>

Last modified 5 days before it was published.

Just for good measure, lets look at the home page

<loc>http://lorelle.wordpress.com/</loc>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
		<lastmod>2008-06-12T02:05:56+00:00</lastmod>

Wrong again - today is the 17th, Lorelle published a post on 16th June, which updated the home page, but it is not reflected in the sitemap.

Sometimes you might be better off with no sitemap at all…

5/10 for finally fulfilling a user request
1/10 for implementation (so far)

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