I switched The New Leaf Journal from using Yoast SEO to The SEO Framework back in early 2022 around the same time we changed hosting. One feature I took advantage of was The SEO Framework’s aesthetic sitemap, which I covered here. In 2023, I decided to drop The SEO Framework’s premium plan (I did not make much use of the paid features and while the pricing is reasonable, I decided it was a cost I could go without) with an eye toward eventually implementing our own SEO solution. With that in mind, I switched from having The SEO Framework handle our sitemaps to using WordPress’s native sitemap functionality. I noticed that shortly after we have been mostly re-indexed by Bing (coming off an unexplained eight-month block) that Bing was having some trouble with our native WordPress sitemaps (note that Google and Yandex had no issues). I decided to switch back to The SEO Framework, which involved toggling its sitemaps on in the plugin settings, updating our robots.txt file with the new URL, and manually updating our sitemap in the webmaster consoles for Google, Bing, and Yandex. One advantage to The SEO Framework’s sitemap is that it only includes posts. While I do not no-index tags and categories, I would rather search engines focus on posts (to the extent they are using the sitemap). Will this help us get our Leaflets and Leaf Buds on Bing (those are our two problem-areas at the moment)? I suppose we will find out…