XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that lists a website's important URLs, helping search engines discover and prioritize pages for crawling.

Definition

An XML sitemap is a roadmap for search engines. It tells them which pages on your site exist, when they were last updated, how often they change, and which ones are most important. Sitemaps do not guarantee indexing, but they dramatically improve discovery, especially for large sites, new sites, or sites with poor internal linking.

Sitemap Best Practices

Keep sitemaps under 50MB or 50,000 URLs (whichever limit you hit first; create multiple sitemaps otherwise). Exclude thin content, duplicate pages, and noindex pages. Use the <priority> and <changefreq> tags but understand Google largely ignores them in favor of actual crawl data. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. Include only canonical URLs.

Sitemap Index Files

Sites with more than 50,000 URLs need a sitemap index file that points to multiple child sitemaps. For example: sitemap-index.xml references sitemap-posts.xml, sitemap-pages.xml, and sitemap-products.xml. Submit only the index file to Search Console.

Note

An XML sitemap is not a substitute for good internal linking. Sitemaps help, but internal links are how Googlebot discovers most pages. If your internal linking is broken, a sitemap alone will not fix crawlability.

In code

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-06-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

Key takeaways:

• XML sitemaps tell search engines which URLs exist

• Critical for large, new, or poorly linked sites

• Submit to Google Search Console for best results