An XML sitemap is a list of the canonical pages you want search engines to discover. It is especially useful for new, large, frequently updated, or poorly linked sites. It does not guarantee indexing, but it gives crawlers a reliable map of the pages that matter.
What belongs in a sitemap
Include complete HTTPS addresses for pages that return a successful response, allow indexing, and use themselves as the canonical version. In most cases, these are the same pages you would confidently send a visitor to from your navigation or internal links.
- Important pages, articles, products, categories, and other original content.
- Only the preferred version of each address.
- Accurate last-modified dates when the page content genuinely changes.
What to leave out
Do not list redirects, error pages, duplicates, filtered search pages, staging addresses, or pages marked noindex. Including them sends conflicting signals: the sitemap asks search engines to index a page while another instruction says not to.
Change frequency and priority are only hints
Search engines may ignore changefreq and priority, so do not spend hours perfecting them. A clean URL list and truthful lastmod values are more useful. Keep the file current when pages are added, removed, or moved.
Publish and submit it
Save the file as sitemap.xml, upload it to your site, reference it in robots.txt, and submit its full address in Google Search Console. Our XML Sitemap Generator creates the file, while the Robots.txt Tester can confirm that the sitemap is reachable.
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