XML Sitemap Generator

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all important URLs on your website, helping search engines discover and crawl your content more efficiently. It's especially important for large sites or sites with complex navigation.

Why You Need a Sitemap

• Discoverability: Helps search engines find pages that might not be linked well.
• Prioritization: Tell search engines which pages are most important.
• Freshness: Indicate when pages were last updated.
• Large sites: Essential for sites with thousands of pages.
• New sites: Helps new sites get indexed faster.

Sitemap Elements Explained

• <loc>: The full URL of the page (required).
• <lastmod>: When the page was last modified (YYYY-MM-DD format).
• <changefreq>: How often the page changes (hint to crawlers).
• <priority>: Relative importance compared to other pages (0.0-1.0).

Priority Guidelines

Change Frequency Guidelines

• Always/Hourly: Real-time content, news feeds
• Daily: News sites, blogs with daily posts
• Weekly: Most blog posts, regularly updated pages
• Monthly: Product pages, about pages
• Yearly: Contact info, terms, static pages
• Never: Archived content

Sitemap Best Practices

• Keep it under 50,000 URLs: Use sitemap index files for larger sites.
• File size under 50MB: Compress large sitemaps with gzip.
• Only include canonical URLs: Don't include redirects or duplicate pages.
• Keep it updated: Update lastmod dates when content changes.
• Submit to search engines: Use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

What NOT to Include

• Pages blocked by robots.txt
• Pages with noindex tags
• Redirect URLs (301, 302)
• Error pages (404, 500)
• Duplicate content pages
• Login/account pages