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What is sitemap? How to create sitemap?

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Good short answers from and — they covered the basics. The thread explains what a sitemap is; the notes below focus on the practical, up‑to‑date things most posts missed: hard protocol limits, how search engines actually treat optional tags, canonicalization best practices, gzipping/index files for large sites, and simple troubleshooting steps you can apply right away.

Important protocol rules and what to do with them: a sitemap file must be no larger than 50 MiB (uncompressed) and contain at most 50,000 URLs; if you have more URLs split into multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index (the index itself follows the same limits). Sitemaps may be gzipped and should be hosted where they apply to the URLs you list (placing at the site root is recommended). Include only the canonical, indexable URLs you want shown in search results; do not list redirects, 4xx/5xx pages, or pages you’ve marked noindex. Also note that <changefreq> and <priority> are only hints (Google ignores them), while <lastmod> is used only if it’s accurate — so populate it carefully. sitemaps.org · Google Search Central: Sitemaps. (sitemaps.org)

Practical checklist and troubleshooting: verify the sitemap URL returns HTTP 200 and is UTF‑8; reference the sitemap in robots.txt or submit it in Google Search Console and check the Sitemaps and Index Coverage reports for errors; split by content type (products, blog, images, video) for very large sites and use a sitemap index; generate sitemaps dynamically on publish instead of bulk re‑stamping lastmod to “today.” If Search Console shows parse or access errors, fix the XML/encoding or server permissions and re‑submit. (developers.google.com)

Quick checklist:

  • Host sitemap at the site root and add Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml to robots.txt.
  • Include only canonical, indexable URLs; exclude redirects and noindex.
  • Keep files < 50,000 URLs / < 50 MiB uncompressed; use a sitemap index when needed.
  • Submit and monitor in Search Console; resolve parse/access errors.
  • Test accessibility, e.g. curl -I https://example.com/sitemap.xml.

Recommended Answers

All 22 Replies

Member Avatar for joshl_1995

Hello saibaba123,
A sitemap is something so search engines such as Google or Bing can know what pages your site has like whats their titles and url here is a website that will construct a sitemap that you can then upload to Google Webmaster Tools.

A sitemap is also something users can refer to if they are looking for something on a website that cannot be found easly kind of like an index in a book people will look there to find where the section they are looking for is located.

Hope this helps you.

Member Avatar for Manish02

A sitemap which is having list of web pages of web site, those are accessible to the web crawlers and users, which is usually in xml format.

Member Avatar for raj432

Sitemap contains links of all page in our website. Sitemap helps search engine while crwaling website.

Member Avatar for thefasninja1

sitemap helps google to know about the site's links and main topics.
Sitemap contain the whole addressess of site :P

Member Avatar for WebOutGateway 
Sitemap helps the user and the search engine bots to easily find pages on your site. There are two popular 

versions of a sitemap. XML sitemap which is designed for search engine purposes and HTML sitemaps for the user's convenience. 

To create Sitemap manually based on the Sitemap protocol: 


1.Create a text file and save it with a .xml extension.
2. Add the following to the top of the file:
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

3.Add the following to the bottom of the file:
    </urlset>

4.Create an entry for each URL. The <loc> tag is required; the others are optional.

<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
 <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
 <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
 <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

5.Upload your Sitemap to your site. Then submit it to Google using Webmaster Tools.
Member Avatar for markjaiby

Hi,

Sitemap is of 3 types i.e XML, HTML, Text
XML is for search engine purpose.
HTML and Text both are for use purpose.
You can search in Google for for sitemap generator tool.
Sitemap contains inbound link or pages of a site.

Member Avatar for mayaestat

Sitemap is one of the page which contains all the links of the websites, so it will be helpful for web crawlers to crawl all the links and indexed it on search engines like Google, yahoo etc..

Member Avatar for Kelly Burby

A site map is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. the best way to create your site map is by using xml site map creator which are mostly available for free.

Member Avatar for Smiti

A Sitemap allows you to create a file hosted among the other files in your account that informs the search engines of all pages your website contains. In other words, it provides the search engine with detailed information about the content of your website.

Member Avatar for Smiti

A site map is a visual or textually organized model of a Web site's content that allows the users to navigate through the site to find the information they are looking for, just as a traditional geographical map helps people find places they are looking for in the real world.

Member Avatar for jobtardisportal

It simply tells about the structure of your site

Member Avatar for sophiarich

It is the list of URLs pages of a website.

Member Avatar for Rakesh456

Sitemap contain all the links of website. Sitemap is very impoartant for ranking website.

Member Avatar for saibaba123

Sitemap helps search engine while crawling website. Sitemap means collection of all the links in website.

Member Avatar for Smiti

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling,Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL,so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Member Avatar for jobtardisportal

Site map is a key to instruct to a google crawlers if we did any changes in our web site, through on site map all the new page r crawlers us soon by google.

Member Avatar for nicky.loverr

Sitemap is of two types.
Html sitemap
Xml sitemap
Xml sitemap allow the crawler to crawl easily.

Member Avatar for ankita_3

A sitemap is also something users can refer to if they are looking for something on a website that cannot be found easly kind of like an index in a book people will look there to find where the section they are looking for is located.

Member Avatar for jobtardis

Ofcourse , Sitemap is used to instruct the google crawler,if that pages has any changes .

Member Avatar for andrewgill

A list of pages or links of website acessible to crawlers and users.XML and HTML are the two popular versions of sitemap.In simple wording we can say index page to sitemap.

Member Avatar for Marton123

Sitemap is nothing but the list of URL's that your website have.. To generate sitemap you can use xml-sitemaps.com

Member Avatar for pravien

Site mape is root map to our site ,Site mape is used to indicate google about our every single web pages...

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