About XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all important pages of a website to ensure search engines can find and crawl them all.
Benefits:
- Helps search engines discover your pages
- Provides metadata about each page (last modified, change frequency, priority)
- Especially useful for large or complex websites
- Can be submitted directly to search engines via their webmaster tools
Best practices:
- Include only canonical URLs (avoid duplicate content)
- Keep the file under 50MB (or split into multiple sitemaps)
- Update the sitemap when you add or remove important pages
- Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools