WP XML Sitemap

As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the following characters: ampersand (&), single quote ('), double quote ("), less than (<), and greater than (>). You should also make sure that all URLs follow the RFC-3986 standard for URIs, the RFC-3987 standard for IRIs, and the XML standard. If you are using a script to generate your URLs, you can generally URL escape them as part of that script. You will still need to entity escape them.

Yes. Your Sitemap files must use UTF-8 encoding.

A: Submitting a Sitemap helps you make sure Google knows about the URLs on your site. It can be especially helpful if your content is not easily discoverable by our crawler (such as pages accessible only through a form). It is not, however, a guarantee that those URLs will be crawled or indexed. We use information from Sitemaps to augment our usual crawl and discovery processes.

A: A Sitemap does not affect the actual ranking of your pages. However, if it helps get more of your site crawled (by notifying us of URLs we didn't previously didn't know about, and/or by helping us prioritize the URLs on your site), that can lead to increased presence and visibility of your site in our index.

A: We recently enabled Sitemap cross-submissions, which means that you can put your Sitemap just about plugin's folder or root as well.