XML Sitemap
A file that lists all important pages on a website to help search engines discover and crawl content.
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website that you want search engines to crawl and index. It acts as a roadmap for search engines, helping them discover your content more efficiently, especially on large sites or sites with complex structures.
XML sitemaps include URLs from your site along with metadata about each URL such as when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is relative to other URLs on your site. This information helps search engines crawl your site more intelligently.
While XML sitemaps don't guarantee that all your pages will be indexed, they do help search engines discover pages that might not be easily found through regular crawling, especially new pages, pages deep in your site structure, or pages with few internal links pointing to them.
Best practices for XML sitemaps include keeping them up to date as you add or remove content, limiting each sitemap to 50,000 URLs (create multiple sitemaps if needed), only including canonical URLs, submitting your sitemap through Google Search Console, and excluding pages you don't want indexed.