What is an XML Sitemap?

An XML (Extensible Markup Language) Sitemap is a text file used to detail all URLs on a website. It can include extra information (metadata) on each URL, with details of when they were last updated, how important they are and whether there are any other versions of the URL created in other languages. All of this is done to help the search engines crawl your website more efficiently, allowing any changes to be fed to them directly, including when a new page is added or an old one removed.

Stick to the following best practices when implementing an XML Sitemap:

• It's strongly recommended to implement an XML Sitemap, especially on larger websites (500+ pages).
• Keep the XML Sitemap up to date with your website's content.
• Make sure it's clean: only indexable pages should be included.
• Reference the XML Sitemap from your robots.txt file.
• Don't list more than 50.000 URLs in a single XML Sitemap.
• Make sure the (uncompressed) file size doesn't exceed 50MB.

Tags used in Sitemap :

• urlset - The Sitemap opens and closes with this tag. It is the current protocol standard.
• url - This is the parent tag for each URL entry.
• loc - This tag contains the absolute URL, or the locator of the page. This value must be less than 2,048 characters.
• lastmod - This contains information about the file 's last modified date. It should be in YYYY-MM-DD format.
• changefreq - This contains information about the frequency with which a file is changed.
  • always
  • hourly
  • daily
  • weekly
  • monthly
  • yearly
  • never
• priority - This indicates the file 's importance within the site. The value ranges from 0.0 to 1.0.

Sitemap Index file:

When you use multiple Sitemap files for one website, each file must be listed collectively in a separate file called the Sitemap index file.

You might need multiple XML Sitemaps if you have more than 50,000 URLs within a site or if one Sitemap exceeds 50Mb. If this is the case, then you will be required to create another XML Sitemap. You have the option to reduce your bandwidth requirement by compressing the Sitemap file using gzip but you need to make sure that after decompressing the file, the size still does not exceed 50Mb.

Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50MB (52,428,800 bytes).

• sitemapindex - The Sitemap index file opens and closes with this tag. It encloses all the XML Sitemaps in the file.
• sitemap - This tag encloses information about individual Sitemaps.

Supported File by XML Sitemaps:

Google can detect the various file types of Sitemaps. These are specific to the type of content on a site and help search engines identify the files much more easily.

List of Sitemap Filetypes:

• HTML
• Video
• Image
• Mobile
• News