Sitemap
A file that lists all your website's pages to help search engines discover and crawl them.
A sitemap is a file (usually XML) that lists all the important pages on your website. It's like giving search engines a map of your site so they can find and crawl every page efficiently.
An XML sitemap includes each URL along with optional metadata: when it was last modified (lastmod), how often it changes (changefreq), and how important it is relative to other pages (priority). Search engines use this information to crawl your site more intelligently.
You submit your sitemap through Google Search Console and reference it in your robots.txt file. Most CMS platforms generate sitemaps automatically. For custom sites, tools and plugins can generate them for you.
You don't need every URL in your sitemap — just the important ones you want indexed. Don't include pages blocked by robots.txt, noindexed pages, redirected URLs, or error pages. Keep it clean and focused on your best content.
Large sites may need multiple sitemaps organized into a sitemap index file. Each individual sitemap can contain up to 50,000 URLs.
Why It Matters for SEO
Sitemaps help search engines discover pages they might miss through regular crawling, especially on large or new sites. They're particularly important for pages with few internal links, newly published content, and sites with thousands of pages.