XML sitemaps are one of the least glamorous and most consequential parts of technical SEO. They tell search engines which URLs on your site you consider canonical and worth crawling, and on large or frequently updated sites they materially affect how quickly new content gets discovered. So if you run WordPress with All in One SEO, the practical question is whether the plugin handles sitemaps properly — and the answer is yes. AIOSEO includes a complete XML sitemap module, enabled by default, with granular control over what gets included. The harder part is configuring it so it reflects your actual site architecture rather than dumping every URL WordPress can generate into a file and hoping for the best.
How AAMAX.CO Can Help With Sitemaps and Indexation
Sitemap problems rarely announce themselves. Pages quietly fail to get indexed, thin archives soak up crawl budget, and conflicting signals between sitemaps, canonicals, and robots rules keep valuable content out of results for months. At AAMAX.CO we audit indexation end to end — sitemap composition, canonical consistency, robots directives, internal linking, and crawl efficiency — then rebuild the configuration so search engines find and prioritise the pages that drive revenue. Our SEO services cover this technical foundation alongside content and authority building for clients worldwide, because a perfect sitemap on a poorly structured site solves nothing. If your pages are not getting indexed, we can find out exactly why.
What AIOSEO's Sitemap Module Includes
AIOSEO generates a sitemap index that links to individual child sitemaps, typically split by post type and taxonomy and paginated once a set grows past the recommended URL limit. That structure matters: an index keeps individual files small enough to parse reliably and makes it far easier to diagnose which content group has a coverage problem.
The module covers standard content sitemaps for posts, pages, and custom post types; taxonomy sitemaps for categories, tags, and custom taxonomies; author and date archive inclusion as optional entries; image references attached to content entries; and additional pages you can register manually for URLs outside WordPress. AIOSEO also supports specialised sitemaps — a news sitemap for publishers with time-sensitive content, a video sitemap for pages hosting video, and an RSS sitemap that helps surface recently published and updated URLs for faster discovery.
Crucially, the module respects your indexing signals. URLs marked noindex, redirected, or excluded through settings should not appear in the sitemap, because a sitemap is a set of recommendations and contradicting yourself weakens every recommendation in the file.
What to Include and What to Leave Out
The guiding principle is simple: a sitemap should contain indexable, canonical, valuable URLs — nothing else. Include your money pages, service and product pages, published posts, and taxonomy pages that have genuine standalone value with real content and intent behind them.
Exclude thin and duplicative surfaces. Tag archives with a single post rarely deserve indexing. Date archives seldom serve users. Author archives matter on multi-author publications and almost nowhere else. Attachment and media pages should generally be disabled entirely rather than merely excluded. Internal search results, faceted filter URLs, cart and checkout pages, thank-you pages, and paginated duplicates all belong outside your sitemap.
Being disciplined here is not cosmetic. On sites with tens of thousands of URLs, crawl budget is finite, and every low-value URL you nominate competes with a page you actually want ranked.
Configuring It Step by Step
Start by confirming the sitemap is enabled and reachable at your site's sitemap index URL. Load it in a browser and check that child sitemaps resolve and contain the URLs you expect. Then work through post types, enabling only those meant to be indexed, and switch off any utility post types created by plugins that produce no user-facing pages.
Move on to taxonomies and disable the ones that generate thin archives on your site. Review the archive settings for authors and dates and disable what does not serve users. Add any external or manually managed URLs through the additional pages option so nothing important is left out.
Once the composition is right, submit the sitemap index in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and confirm your robots.txt references the sitemap location. Then monitor: coverage reports will tell you whether submitted URLs are being indexed, and discrepancies between submitted and indexed counts are your early warning system.
Common Mistakes That Cause Real Damage
The most frequent problem is running two sitemap systems at once. WordPress core generates its own sitemaps, and other SEO plugins do too. When AIOSEO's sitemap is active, the core sitemap should be disabled and any competing plugin's sitemap turned off, otherwise you publish conflicting URL sets and confuse your own reporting.
The second is including noindexed URLs, which sends a contradictory instruction and erodes trust in the file. The third is including non-canonical variants — URLs with tracking parameters, HTTP versions after an HTTPS migration, or trailing-slash duplicates. The fourth is neglecting last-modified accuracy: if every URL reports the same recent timestamp, the signal becomes meaningless and crawlers learn to ignore it.
Finally, caching plugins and CDNs sometimes serve stale sitemap files. After significant changes, purge caches and verify the live output rather than trusting the settings screen.
Sitemaps Are Discovery, Not Ranking
It is worth being clear about what sitemaps do and do not achieve. They help search engines discover URLs, which is essential for new, deep, or poorly linked content. They do not make a page rank, and submitting a URL does not guarantee indexing. Google indexes what it judges worth indexing, based on quality, uniqueness, and internal link support. A page that only exists in your sitemap and is linked from nowhere is telling search engines that you do not value it either.
That is why sitemap work should sit alongside internal linking improvements, content consolidation, and quality upgrades. As search continues shifting toward AI-generated answers, the same fundamentals — crawlable, well-structured, genuinely useful content — determine whether you get surfaced at all, which is the thinking behind our GEO services.
The Bottom Line
All in One SEO does include XML sitemaps, and the implementation is capable enough for large, complex WordPress sites — with index files, post type and taxonomy control, news, video, and RSS variants, and respect for your indexing directives. Configure it deliberately: include only canonical, indexable, valuable URLs, disable competing sitemap sources, keep last-modified dates honest, submit to search consoles, and monitor coverage. Do that and your sitemap becomes a reliable discovery channel instead of noise.
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