Sitemap

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file, usually in XML format, listing the pages of a website that search engines should know about. It helps crawlers discover new and changed pages, especially on large sites or for pages with few internal links. A sitemap does not guarantee that a page will be indexed.

Why is a sitemap important?

• Faster discovery: new pages are found sooner.
• Insight: in Google Search Console you can see per sitemap how many pages were submitted and indexed.
• Large sites: with many pages, a sitemap helps crawlers find their way.

Examples of a sitemap

• https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
• A sitemap index that points to separate sitemaps for pages, blog posts and products
• Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml in your robots.txt

How do you use a sitemap?

Let your CMS generate the sitemap automatically and only include pages you want indexed. Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console and reference it in your robots.txt. A single sitemap may contain at most 50,000 URLs or 50 MB (uncompressed); beyond that you split it up. See technical SEO.