Google Sites Stopped Generating XML Sitemap Files

Mar 2, 2021 - 7:51 am 5 by

Google Sites Sitemaps

Google Sites over a decade, almost 15 years, has automatically generated XML sitemap files to be used for Google Search Console. Well, that is no longer the case. Google has removed the Google Sites sitemaps details from the documentation yesterday.

It previously had these four options for generating the sitemap:

(1) XML

(2) RSS, mRSS, and Atom 1.0

(3) Text

(4) Google Sites

The fourth option, Google Sites, has been removed.

Google wrote in the docs "If you've used Google Sites to create and verify a site, Google Sites will automatically generate a sitemap for you. You cannot modify the sitemap, but you can submit it to Google if you want to read the sitemap report data. Note that your sitemap might not be displayed properly if you have more than 1,000 pages in a single sub-directory."

Here is a screen shot of it before it was removed:

Google Sitemaps Google Sites Screenshot

This option was removed on March 1, 2021.

I am not sure if this is a big deal or not, I don't know many people who use Google Sites.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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