Skip to content
Garbuz.Online
Language
Get an audit
SEO Wiki · Technical SEO

sitemap.xml

Author: SEO Specialist Published

Definition

sitemap.xml — An XML sitemap is a file listing a site’s important URLs to help search engines discover them.

Quick answer

Include only canonical, indexable URLs returning 200. Up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB per file; beyond that use a sitemap index. lastmod must reflect real changes.

What matters

  • Google uses lastmod only when it is consistently accurate; priority and changefreq are ignored.
  • A sitemap does not guarantee indexing — it is a discovery signal.
  • For multilingual sites the sitemap can also carry hreflang annotations.

Sources

  1. Build and submit a sitemap — Google Search Central
→Canonical→

robots.txt

robots.txt is a text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which sections they may or may not crawl.

Indexing

Indexing is the process in which a search engine analyses a crawled page and stores it in its index, from which it can be shown in results.

Hreflang

Hreflang is an attribute that tells search engines about equivalent language or regional versions of the same page.

Tell me about your project

Shall we discuss your project?

Leave your site’s address and goal — within one business day you’ll get first observations and next steps.

Or write directly