# Discourse Sitemap

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-sitemap/40348
**Category:** Plugin
**Tags:** sitemap, deprecated, included-in-core
**Created:** [February 29, 2016, 8:20pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-sitemap/40348 "2016-02-29T20:20:15Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1

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### Author: ![Discourse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/discourse/32/148734_2.png) [@Discourse](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Discourse)
#### Post date: [February 29, 2016, 8:20pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-sitemap/40348/1 "2016-02-29T20:20:15Z")

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| :discourse2: | **Summary** | **Discourse Sitemap** adds a sitemap.xml to your Discourse instance |
| 📖 | **Install Guide** | **This plugin is bundled with Discourse core**. There is no need to install the plugin separately. |

### Features

There has been [some](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-create-xml-sitemap-is-there-any-plugin/33654) [discussion](https://meta.discourse.org/t/sitemap-xml-for-google-webmaster/9054/9) over the need of a sitemap, and I think Discourse doesn’t really need one, although I do believe that a forum might be indexed a bit faster with one.

Anyway, we created this plugin because of a customer that needed a sitemap for Google News, and[this trick](https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-and-submitting-xml-sitemaps-to-google-bing-yandex/22655) didn’t work because they were using Amazon S3 to store their uploads (which broke the same domain requirement)

### Configuration

Just enable it using the site setting in the Plugins menu, and you will get

- `/sitemap.xml`
- `/news.xml`
- A `Sitemap` line in `robots.txt`

### Do you need a sitemap?

No. You do not necessarily “need” a `sitemap.xml` file.

> <https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/4803/the-sitemap-paradox/5151#5151>

**TL;DR** You can get faster indexing with a sitemap, but it doesn’t necessarily make for better SEO.

If you have a very large site, this may benefit you by allowing for faster page indexing.

### CHANGELOG

- Add new bullets when major features are committed here

### TODO

- Including a XSLT to display it more nicely to humans ([should be local due to same origin policy](http://stackoverflow.com/a/7529105/1632545)) so we should have a way to register an asset that is [accessible as a separate file](https://meta.discourse.org/t/register-an-asset-for-external-site-consumption/34897).

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-sitemap/40348)._