Definition

An XML sitemap is a file that lists the important URLs of a site together with metadata (last modified date, change frequency, priority). It helps search engines discover and prioritise content for indexing.

Why it helps

• Speed up the discovery of new pages
• Signal updates to search engines
• Optimise the crawl budget on large sites
• Cover content that is poorly connected through internal linking

Best practices

• Only list canonical URLs (see canonical tag) that return a 200 status
• Exclude pages with noindex or blocked by robots.txt
• Keep the file clean, gzip-compressed beyond 50,000 URLs or 50 MB
• Declare it in robots.txt and inside Search Console
• For multilingual sites, use hreflang attributes inside the sitemap