The Sitemap System
One authoritative sitemap with per-type sub-sitemaps.
The Sitemap System
A sitemap is the master list of every page on your site that you want search engines to find. Google and Bing read it to discover new pages faster and to know when old ones changed. Vibe builds and maintains this list for you automatically. This lesson explains what Vibe's sitemap includes, where to see it, and how to nudge the search engines when you publish a batch of new content.
What Vibe builds
Your main sitemap lives at /vp-sitemap.xml (for example, yoursite.com/vp-sitemap.xml). It is not one giant file. It is an index that points at smaller sub-sitemaps, one per content type:
/vp-sitemap-page.xmlfor your pages/vp-sitemap-post.xmlfor your blog posts- One
/vp-sitemap-{type}.xmlfile for each other public content type you have
Splitting it this way keeps each file small and fast, and it is how Google prefers large sites to be organized. Only content types that actually have published posts appear in the index. Each sub-sitemap lists every published item of that type, records the date it was last modified so search engines know what is fresh, and includes the featured image for each page so your photos can show up in image search.
If you run virtual city pages, there is also a /vp-sitemap-cities.xml sub-sitemap. This one only lists the city pages you have reviewed and promoted to indexing. Every other virtual city stays hidden and out of the sitemap until you review it, which is exactly what you want. You never want to point Google at half-finished pages.
The one rule for what gets included
A page is in the sitemap unless you have marked it noindex. That setting lives in the Robots field of the Vibe SEO box on each individual page or post. If you set a page to noindex, Vibe leaves it out of the sitemap automatically. Nothing else to do. Vibe also uses your canonical URL if you set one, so duplicate pages point search engines to the right original.
Where it lives in your dashboard
Open the Sitemap page from the Vibe SEO menu. The top card shows your live sitemap URL with an Open in new tab button so you can view the raw XML. Below that, the What's included card shows a table of how many indexable URLs you have for each content type, with a total at the bottom. This is a quick health check. If a number looks wrong, you probably have pages accidentally set to noindex.
The dormant state, and how to turn it on
Vibe only publishes its own sitemap when it is the primary SEO renderer for your site. This avoids a clash if you still have another SEO plugin running its own sitemap. If Vibe is not primary yet, the Sitemap page shows a yellow "Vibe's sitemap is dormant" notice with a button that reads "Make Vibe the primary SEO renderer." Click it once. /vp-sitemap.xml goes live, and your other SEO plugin keeps running quietly in the background as a backup. You do not have to uninstall anything.
Once Vibe is primary, it also does two quiet housekeeping jobs for you. It adds a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt so search engines find the sitemap on their own during a normal crawl, with no submission needed. And it turns off WordPress core's separate /wp-sitemap.xml so there is only one authoritative sitemap, not two competing lists.
Resubmitting after a big publish
Search engines recrawl on their own schedule, but if you just published fifty or more new pages, or ran a Generation batch, you can speed things up. In the Resubmit to search engines card, click Resubmit Sitemap. This instantly pings IndexNow, which covers Bing and Yandex, and also pings Google to prompt a recrawl.
If you connect your Google account with write access, a second card unlocks. There you can submit your sitemap straight to Google Search Console and turn on auto-indexing, which asks Google to recrawl brand-new pages one by one, up to a daily cap you set (default 10, max 200). That card also tells you whether your sitemap is up to date or whether you have published new content since the last submit, and it keeps a log of recent indexing requests.
Good result, and common mistakes
A healthy setup means /vp-sitemap.xml loads and lists your sub-sitemaps, the What's included totals match what you expect, and Google Search Console shows the sitemap as read with no errors. Submit it to Search Console once by hand, then let Vibe handle the rest.
Two mistakes to avoid. First, do not resubmit constantly. It does nothing extra and can look spammy. Resubmit only after a real batch of new content. Second, if a page you want ranked is missing from the sitemap, check its Robots setting first. Nine times out of ten it was left on noindex.
The visitor version
There is also a human-friendly sitemap for your readers. Drop the [vp_html_sitemap] shortcode on any page to list every page grouped by type. It accepts optional settings like post_types, exclude, limit, and order. This is handy as a footer link or an old-school site map page.