Sitemap

Definition

A sitemap is a mechanism to provide a list of URLs to help search engines discover, crawl, and refresh your content more efficiently. The most common form is an XML sitemap (sitemap.xml). Large or programmatic sites often use a sitemap index to split multiple sitemaps.

Why it matters

• Speeds up discovery and crawling of new pages
• Reduces crawl waste on unimportant URLs
• Helps manage coverage for multilingual and large-scale sites
• Helps crawlers discover orphan pages (pages without internal links)
• Provides lastmod to signal content freshness to search engines
• Serves as key data source for Search Console index monitoring
• Supports extended markup for video, image, and news content

How to implement

• Include only canonical + indexable URLs (exclude noindex/redirects/404s)
• Split large sitemaps (50,000 URL limit) using a sitemap index
• Reference sitemap in robots.txt via Sitemap: directive
• Submit and monitor in Search Console / Bing Webmaster Tools
• Use lastmod only when content actually changes (avoid auto-updating dates)
• Consider separate sitemaps for different content types (pages, images, videos)
• Automate sitemap generation in your build/deploy pipeline

Examples

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2025-01-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/blog/seo-guide</loc>
    <lastmod>2025-01-15</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

<!-- Sitemap Index for large sites -->
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-pages.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2025-01-01</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-blog.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2025-01-15</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

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