Sitemaps and sitemap.xml

A sitemap is a file that lists the pages on your website and helps search engines crawl and index your content more effectively. Think of it as a table of contents — it shows the structure of your site and the relationships between pages.

Sitemap structure

An XML sitemap is a structured file that tells search engine bots exactly which pages exist on your site and are available for crawling. Don't confuse it with a user-facing HTML sitemap at something like http://example.com/sitemap/ — they serve very different purposes.

An XML sitemap tells search engines:

• Where your pages are located
• When each page was last updated
• How frequently pages are likely to change
• How important each page is relative to the rest of the site

XML file structure

Example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2021-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

Tag reference:

• urlset — the root element that wraps the entire file; required
• sitemapindex — the parent tag used when you have multiple sitemap files and need an index file
• sitemap — a child of sitemapindex; contains a reference to one sitemap file
• url — a container block for a single page entry
• loc — the full URL of the page
• lastmod — the date the page content was last modified (optional; for mostly static sites, changefreq alone is often enough)
• changefreq — a hint about how often the page changes. Accepted values: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never
• priority — the page's relative importance within your site, on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0 (e.g. 0.8 for important pages, 0.5 as a neutral default)

XML sitemap structure

How to submit your sitemap

1. Place the file in your site's root directory: http://example.com/sitemap.xml
2. If you have multiple sitemaps, create an index file that links to all of them
3. Reference it in your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml

4. Submit the URL in the webmaster tools of each search engine you care about:
   • Google Search Console
   • Yandex Webmaster

Submitting a sitemap in webmaster tools

Yandex requirements

Supported formats:

• XML (recommended)
• Plain text (.txt)

Limits:

• Maximum uncompressed file size: 10 MB
• Punycode is supported in both encoded and Unicode form

Google requirements

Supported formats:

• XML — the standard and recommended format
• RSS, media RSS, and Atom 1.0 — suitable for blogs with an existing feed
• Plain text .txt — UTF-8 encoded, URLs only, nothing else in the file
• Google Sites — sitemap is generated automatically; you can submit it but can't edit it

Limits:

• Up to 50,000 URLs per sitemap file
• Maximum uncompressed file size: 50 MB
• If a subdirectory contains more than 1,000 pages, a Google Sites sitemap may not render correctly