Sitemaps are used to tell search engines what pages on a website they should crawl and how often. They are usually stored in the root of a website (e.g., https://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml) and usually consist of extensible markup language (XML) files or hypertext markup language (HTML) files.
XML Sitemap Entries
XML sitemaps are only used by search engines. And two different types may be created: 1) a standard sitemap or 2) a sitemap index. The sitemap index is used in situations where the sitemap has to be split into two or more files because they are greater than 50,000 entries or greater than 50MB.
Location
The uniform resource locator (URL) of the page to be searched.
Last Modified
The date the page was last modified.
Change Frequency
How often the page content changes:
- Never
- Yearly
- Monthly
- Weekly
- Daily
- Hourly
- Always
Priority
Tells the search engine which pages to search first on a scale from 0.0 to 1.0, with 0.0 being the lowest priority and 1.0 being the highest priority.
HTML Sitemap Entries
HTML sitemaps are human readable and include a list of links to pages on a website. They may be structured differently, but they need to be crawlable links.
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Additional Considerations
Eliminate duplicate entries and broken links. And don’t include pages that are marked with a “noindex” meta element, like the following:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Recommended Practice
The best way to generate a sitemap is to do it programmatically. But keep in mind, they are currently limited to 50,000 URLs or 50MB in size. Sitemap indexes may exceed those limitations with multiple sitemaps.
TinySitemapGenerator
Additional Resources