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XML Sitemap

Published: · Updated:

An XML sitemap is a file listing the site URLs that should be indexed, together with metadata — primarily the last modification date (lastmod). The format is defined by the sitemaps.org protocol, supported by all major search engines.

A sitemap does not guarantee indexing — it is a discovery channel. It brings the most value on sites that are large, newly launched, poorly interlinked or frequently changing, where a bot might not reach pages within a reasonable time.

Technical rules

  • At most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB (uncompressed) per file; larger sites use a sitemap index.
  • Only canonical URLs returning 200 — no redirects, noindex pages or duplicates.
  • lastmod should reflect a real content change; Google ignores priority and changefreq.
  • The sitemap location is declared in robots.txt and in Google Search Console.

Special sitemaps

Beyond the standard page sitemap there are extensions for images, video and news, as well as sitemaps with hreflang annotations for language versions. In practice, sitemap generation should be automated and tied to the content publishing cycle.

Example

A minimal sitemap with two URLs — only canonical addresses returning 200, with a real lastmod date.

XML 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-07-01</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/pricing</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-06-15</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>
Declaration in robots.txt
Example 
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Sources & further reading

Related terms

noindex A directive telling search engine bots not to add a page to the index. It does not block crawling — only indexing. Usually set via meta robots or the X-Robots-Tag header.Crawl Budget The number of URLs a search engine bot can and wants to crawl on a site within a given time. Critical for large and frequently changing websites.Canonical URL The address designated as the primary version of a page among duplicates (rel="canonical"). It consolidates ranking signals and prevents copies from being indexed.Structured Data A standardized format for describing page content (usually JSON-LD with the Schema.org vocabulary) that helps search engines understand a page and qualify it for rich results.
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