XML Sitemaps

One of the most important aspects of any blog is its discoverability. When you write a post, it's usually because you want someone to read it! For this reason, making your content search engine and social network friendly is extremely important.

Two months ago we added custom post meta to Ghost by default so that you can customise the data which you send to these places. A month ago, we added structured data support, so that social networks and search engines are able to read your custom post meta more easily.

Today, we're introducing automatic XML sitemaps as core functionality within Ghost to take this another step further.

An XML sitemap is a complete list of all the pages on your site, in a format which can be easily consumed by search engines. In short, it's a page which tells Google where all your content lives that it should crawl and place in its search results.

You can see an example of the sitemap for our own blog right here: https://ghost.org/resources/sitemap.xml

We've also updated Ghost's robots.txt with a link to your sitemap, so that search engines are able to discover it automatically even if you don't go through a manual submission process via something like Google WebMaster Tools.

This feature is a major step forward in Ghost's native SEO support. Enjoy your new and improved rankings!

Ghost(Pro) users already have sitemaps running right now, there's nothing you need to do! Users running Ghost on their own servers can grab this feature by upgrading to Ghost 0.5.7.