Sitemap (XML Sitemap)

A sitemap is a file, normally XML, that lists the URLs of a website along with optional details such as the last modification date. It tells search engines which pages exist and are worth crawling.

Why it matters

Sitemaps are especially useful for large sites, new sites with few inbound links and pages that are poorly linked. They are hints, not guarantees of indexing. Listing only canonical, working URLs keeps them trustworthy.

Reference the file in your robots.txt with a Sitemap: line and submit it in each search engine's webmaster tools so you can see which URLs were accepted, skipped or errored.

Example

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/pricing</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-10-01</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Common mistakes

• Including redirected, blocked or error URLs in the sitemap.
• Setting every lastmod to today's date, so crawlers learn to ignore it.
• Exceeding limits of 50,000 URLs or 50 MB per file without using a sitemap index.

Related

• robots.txt
• Web crawler
• Search engine
• Redirect 301 and 302
• टूल: Robots txt checker

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