What is Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a structured list of all URLs of a website that helps search engines with crawling and indexing. It contains information such as: URL, last modification date (lastmod), change frequency (changefreq), and priority. Sitemaps are especially important for: large websites with many pages, new websites without many backlinks, websites with deep page structure, and websites with dynamic content. The sitemap should be submitted in Google Search Console. Besides XML sitemaps, there are also HTML sitemaps for users and special sitemaps for images, videos, and news.
Key Points
- XML format for search engines, HTML for users
- Max. 50,000 URLs or 50MB per sitemap
- Sitemap Index for large websites
- Link in robots.txt
- Update regularly when changes occur
- Only include canonical URLs
Practical Example
“After the website relaunch, we submitted the new sitemap in Search Console.”