Sitemap

Chinaski publishes a search-engine sitemap for each language automatically on every build, and each page and post has its own sitemap settings. This page explains what goes into the sitemap and how you control it.

What the sitemap contains

Each language gets its own sitemap.xml file. It always contains:

The language’s home page (highest priority).
The blog index, if your blog uses a URL prefix.

Then every published page and post, in the language, each with:

Its last-modified date (from the last save).
A priority (see below).
An optional change frequency.
The featured image, if the page or post has one, listed as an image entry (with its title); this is the “image sitemap” support search engines use, and the extension is added only when at least one entry has a featured image.

Pages/posts you’ve protected with a password are excluded; so are drafts, unpublished items, and anything in the trash. Only public content appears.

Sitemap settings on a page or post

Open a page or post in the editor and find the Sitemap section:

Include in sitemap: a checkbox, on by default. Turn it off to keep that page out of the sitemap (useful for internal pages, thank-you pages, or anything you don’t want surfaced in search).
Priority: how important this page is relative to others on your site, from 0.0 to 1.0. Leave it on “Default”: pages then get 0.8, posts 0.7. Use higher values sparingly: everything at 1.0 helps nothing.
Change frequency: optional hint (Always/Hourly/Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly/Never) for how often the page changes. Leaving it as “None” omits the tag entirely, which is fine; search engines mostly ignore this field, and the last-modified date carries real signal.

Both the include-setting and priority are saved with the page and applied at the next build. Build validation checks that each language’s sitemap is present and well-formed; a build problem with the sitemap shows up as a critical finding in the build report.

Sitemap and search engines

The sitemap alone isn’t the discovery mechanism: search engines find it via robots.txt, which Chinaski generates:

With the normal configuration, robots.txt advertises the sitemap address for each language.
If the site-wide noindex setting is on, the sitemap reference is removed from robots.txt (and crawling is discouraged); the sitemap file itself is still generated, so turning noindex on and off doesn’t lose anything.

Language handling

Every configured language gets its own independent sitemap at its language path (for example /en/sitemap.xml and /es/sitemap.xml), each advertising only that language’s content. There is no master index file to submit; submit each language’s sitemap (or your site’s robots.txt, which lists them all) in the relevant search console.

Quick recipes

Hide a page from search entirely: uncheck “Include in sitemap,” and keep the site-wide noindex setting in mind (see above).
Featured product/page above the rest: priority 0.9–1.0 for that one entry.
Blog, mostly: leave everything at defaults; 0.7 for posts and 0.8 for pages is a sane baseline.