Linking Sitemap to all the Webpages

[Nora Smith]

Can you please tell me do I have link sitemap to all my webpages on the website or is enough linking to one page only?

[odeskavita]

A sitemap acts like a guide or map for web crawlers and makes it easy for them to understand whether or not the website contains the content they are looking for. However, just like you, people often get confused about whether to generate and link a sitemap just to their main page or if they should do it on every webpage of their website.

See, it is not illegal to not link a sitemap to every page of your website or to any page at all. Many websites are running fine without implementing a sitemap to their website. But (and this is a huge "But"), if you want a proper utilization of SEO, you must ensure to link a site map not just to the main page but to each and every page associated with your website. This helps in pages getting indexed properly and eventually helps you achieve a better ranking on google.

Submitting a sitemap for every page will also help the deeply buried pages to get discovered, which also has a great positive effect on your website’s overall ranking.

[bavya]

It is recommend to submit sitemap for every page.

[Dani]

To clarify what has been posted here, you don’t submit an individual sitemap file for each webpage on your site. You submit a single sitemap file that includes every webpage that you want to be indexed by Google.

This means it’s very important to leave out any URLs for pages that are noindexed or excluded from crawling via a robots.txt file. Additionally, if you have multiple webpages that include the same or very similar content, only include the canonical URL (and, as a side note, be sure to use the rel=canonical meta tag).

There are times, however, when you will want to submit multiple sitemap files. This is when either you have more than 50K URLs (which I believe is the URL limit for a single sitemap file), or when you want to utilize Google Search Console to see indexing statistics on a per-sitemap basis. For example, you can create different sitemap files for the different sections of your website, and then use Google Search Console to see which sections of your site Google likes better than others, and which sections you perhaps need to improve the content of to get better Google placement. When using multiple sitemap files, you will want to include a sitemap index file that lists out the sitemap files.

You can submit your sitemap index, as well as individual sitemap files, to Google a search Console, as well as listing them in your robots.txt file (as so: Sitemap: <URL>).

[seo-specialist]

I use Plugins to create simple Sitemaps. They do not need any special designs. They only must crawled by robots, users will not use sitemaps. If you link from sitemap by adding manually links this will be a hard work for big websites. So better use Plugins!
Regards
Somsak Döppers
(SEO Specialist from Germany)