Hello!
TSF only generates one sitemap for each language of your site. If you don’t use a translation plugin, you should have at most one sitemap.
This sitemap is displayed virtually and is not stored in your filesystem. It can be accessed via various methods like changing the endpoint (www, HTTP(S), queries, etc.) on your website.
Only the root endpoint of your website should be prevalent. It’s up to you to choose a version; I prefer using HTTPS (for privacy, performance, and security reasons) without the archaic ‘www’ subdomain and with a trailing slash since the RFCs are all over the place. This will create https://example.com/.
Google does not need to be aware of any other root endpoints that may still be accessible, and TSF automatically chooses the correct version for you via canonical URLs as configured in WordPress’s general settings — provided you’ve not fiddled with wp-config.php constants like WP_SITEURL. If you do manage other versions of your website, you may run into duplicated content issues.
About the stylesheet
The .xsl script expects content to style. When no expected content is available, it won’t be rendered. That’s why you’ll see a different ‘sitemap’ when you visit the stylesheet script directly.
Since the .xsl file is a script, it’s protected by the CORS protocol for your security. We use the canonical URL of your site to generate its valid endpoint, and we’ll never roguery change the endpoint based on the visitor’s inputted URL. This is why you see the error message when you access the sitemap from an unregistered endpoint.
If you read the error message you got carefully, focus on this part: “Domains, protocols and ports must match.” You’ve changed the real domains noted in this error message, but they did not match originally.
– Domains: This means that even the subdomain much match, such as www or non-www. We could work around this, but that’d defeat the purpose of CORS.
– Protocols: HTTPS vs. HTTP. We could work around this… but that’d invalidate privacy policies.
– Ports: 443 vs. 80. The equivalent of ‘protocols’ in this case.
For everything else, please refer to our KB about sitemaps.
