XML Sitemap

Definition

An XML sitemap is a file that lists important URLs on your site to help search engines discover and crawl them efficiently. It doesn’t guarantee rankings, but improves discovery and coverage.

Why it matters

• Accelerates discovery and crawling of new pages, especially orphan pages
• Helps large sites and pSEO sites manage indexing scope
• Works with Search Console for monitoring index status and errors
• Provides lastmod to signal content freshness to search engines
• Supports extended markup for images, videos, and news content
• Is a fundamental item in SEO technical audits
• Helps multilingual sites differentiate URLs across language versions

How to implement

• Include only canonical + indexable URLs (avoid noindex, redirects, 404s, soft 404s)
• Update lastmod only when content actually changes (avoid auto-refreshing dates)
• Use sitemap index for large sites (max 50,000 URLs per sitemap)
• Reference sitemap in robots.txt via Sitemap: directive
• Regularly validate that all sitemap URLs return 200 status
• Use gzip compression for large sitemaps (.xml.gz)
• Automate sitemap generation in your CI/CD 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/products/widget</loc>
    <lastmod>2025-01-10</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

// Auto-generate sitemap (Node.js example)
const { SitemapStream, streamToPromise } = require('sitemap');
const { createWriteStream } = require('fs');

const sitemap = new SitemapStream({ hostname: 'https://example.com' });
const writeStream = createWriteStream('./public/sitemap.xml');

sitemap.pipe(writeStream);
sitemap.write({ url: '/', lastmod: new Date(), priority: 1.0 });
sitemap.write({ url: '/blog', lastmod: new Date() });
sitemap.end();

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