Including Date and Author Archives in Your XML Sitemap

You may be wondering whether you should include date and author archives in your XML Sitemap.

You may want to know whether these are important to your site and should be listed on search engines.

For most sites, the answer is no, these have no value or benefit when included in search results.

However, there are some exceptions.

What Are Date and Author Archives

Date Archives

This WordPress archive lists all the posts published on a specific date, month or year. For example, if you go to https://ml.aioseo.com/tr/2020/ you'll see all posts we've published in 2020. These archives may be important if you run a news website where visitors want to find posts by date. In this case you would want to include date archives in your XML Sitemap.

Author Archives

This WordPress archive lists all the posts published by a specific person. This may be important if you run a site with multiple authors that have built a following and where visitors want to find posts written by that person. In this case you would want to include author archives in your XML Sitemap.

Including Date and Author Archive in Your XML Sitemap

To include these archives in your sitemap, go to Sitemaps in the All in One SEO menu.

Sitemaps menu item in All in One SEO

In the Sitemap Settings section you'll see settings for Date Archive Sitemap and Author Sitemap. By default, these are set to Disabled. Change the setting Enabled to include the archive.

Date Archive Sitemap and Author Sitemap settings for XML Sitemap

You may be wondering whether you should include date and author archives in your XML Sitemap.

You may want to know whether these are important to your site and should be listed on search engines.

For most sites, the answer is no, these have no value or benefit when included in search results.

However, there are some exceptions:

Date Archives: This WordPress archive lists all the posts published on a specific date, month or year. For example, if you go to https://ml.aioseo.com/tr/2020/ you'll see all posts we've published in 2020. These archives may be important if you run a news website where visitors want to find posts by date. In this case you would want to include date archives in your XML Sitemap.

Author Archives: This WordPress archive lists all the posts published by a specific person. This may be important if you run a site with multiple authors that have built a following and where visitors was to find posts written by that person. In this case you would want to include author archives in your XML Sitemap.

To include these archives in your sitemap, go to XML Sitemap in the All in One SEO menu and you'll see settings for Include Date Archive Pages and Include Author Pages.

Check the box for each setting to include those archives in your sitemap.

Important:
If these archives are set to Noindex under All in One SEO » General Settings » Noindex Settings then they will not appear in the XML Sitemap.

Note:
Search engines can still index your archives and display them in search results even if they're not included in your sitemap. Always use noindex to stop search engines indexing content.