Pay attention to XML sitemap
A common misconception is that XML sitemaps trigger faster indexing. They don’t — no search engine indexes pages based on the presence or absence of a sitemap. What a sitemap does is tell the search engine which pages are important.
What is an XML sitemap?
As the name suggests, it’s a map of your website: it tells crawlers which pages matter and how to get there. Sitemaps are particularly handy when not all internal pages are interlinked — adding those URLs to the sitemap tells crawlers they belong to your site.
Why do I need an XML sitemap?
Sitemaps are most useful when launching a new site with few external links pointing at it, when your architecture is complicated, or when your site has many dynamic pages (common for e-commerce). Tags in the sitemap communicate the relative priority of pages and how often they update, giving the search engine the bigger picture of your business.
XML sitemap and robots.txt
Businesses create two kinds of pages: pages for customers and utility pages. A robots.txt file — part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol — instructs crawlers how to crawl the site, including which parts not to crawl. While listing URLs in your sitemap, build the robots.txt alongside it: keep utility pages out of the index while making sure every search-friendly page gets crawled.
How to create an XML sitemap
Most content management systems generate one automatically, and free online generators exist too. Once created, check that:
- The file opens and closes with the correct protocol.
- All URLs are complete, each wrapped in a
<url>tag. - Language variants of the same page are indicated appropriately.
- Proper canonicalization indicates any domain redirection.
- The file avoids stray alphanumeric or Latin-1 special characters.
Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console, or reference it from robots.txt: Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap-location.xml