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I use Yoast as SEO for my new Wordpress website, however I couldn't get the sitemaps with Yoast as it was giving me error 404, and regardless of what I tried, it wasn't working. So I then got the All In One SEO while still having Yoast installed, I easily got the AIO sitemaps and then submitted them successfully to the Google search console.

My question is that now I got the sitemaps on Google, since I'd rather use Yoast, If I want to delete AIO, will the sidemaps given to Google become invalid?

There is no point keeping both SEO plugins active right?

Thank You

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There is no point in keeping both plugins active, in fact I'd think they'd end up conflicting with each-other. If you want to use Yoast instead, you can make this transition fairly effortlessly by exporting your SEO settings from All In One SEO and importing them into Yoast.

Here are the steps to export your settings in All InOne SEO:

  1. Log into your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Click “All in One SEO” then “Feature Manager”.
  3. Click “Activate” next to the “Importer & Exporter” tool.
  4. Click “Importer & Exporter” in the All in One SEO menu.
  5. Choose your export settings then click the “Export” button to save them.

Then in Yoast on the left hand side in your WP Admin dashboard navigate to Tools > Import and Export:

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If you delete AIO before exporting your settings, that data will be erased, however, both plugins use the sitemap_index structure for their sitemap files, so even if you did remove AIO and then created a new sitemap within Yoast, the links would return 200 when Google requested them (assuming you apply the same settings). So the sitemap that you already submitted to Google would not necessarily become invalid.

You might not even have to export the settings from AIO first if you don't want to - if you have both activated, you should be able simply go to Import within Yoast and select the option to import from AIO SEO.

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Without the plugin that generates them, the sitemaps won't become invalid, but they won't get updated either. New pages won't get added to the sitemap, deleted pages won't get removed from the sitemap, URL changes won't get updated in your sitemap.

One of the biggest advantages of sitemaps is that when you add a new page or post to your site, it gets added to the sitemap and Googlebot comes to crawl it quickly. If you are not adding new pages to the sitemap, Google will find the new pages by following links on your site, but it may not happen as quickly as with a sitemap.

Another advantage to sitemaps is that they tell Google which URLs you prefer. If you change URLs for some pages and don't update the sitemaps, you will be giving Google conflicting signals about what the correct, canonical URLs should be. Google is pretty good about choosing one or the other, but Google may not always make the choice you would want if your sitemap is out of date.

You probably don't need an XML sitemap for SEO, they don't improve rankings and have little impact on which pages get indexed. However, if you are going to have a sitemap, you should keep it up to date. I wouldn't recommend deleting the plugin that generates your sitemap.

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