January 31, 2020 Corporate Team

Sitemap

What is a Sitemap?

Sitemap – An XML file or page on a website that lists all of the pages and posts for search engines to see. This document helps search engines quickly understand all of the content that they should be aware of on a particular website.

A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. It tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page.

You can use a sitemap to provide information about specific types of content on your pages, including video and image content. For example:

Do I need a sitemap?

If your site’s pages are properly linked, Google can usually discover most of your site. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites or more specialized files.

Using a sitemap doesn’t guarantee that all the items in your sitemap will be crawled and indexed, as Google processes rely on complex algorithms to schedule crawling. However, in most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap, and you’ll never be penalized for having one.

You might need a sitemap if:

Your site is large. As a result, it’s more likely Google web crawlers might overlook crawling some of your new or recently updated pages.
Your site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or not well linked to each other. If your site pages do not naturally reference each other, you can list them in a sitemap to ensure that Google does not overlook some of your pages.
Your site is new and has few external links to it. Googlebot and other web crawlers crawl the web by following links from one page to another. As a result, Google might not discover your pages if no other sites link to them.
Your site has a lot of rich media content (video, images) or is shown in Google News. Google can take additional information from sitemaps into account for search, where appropriate.

You might not need a sitemap if:

Your site is “small”. By small, we mean about 500 pages or less on your site. (Only pages that you think need to be in search results count toward this total.)
You’re on a simple site hosting service like Blogger or Wix. If your site is on a service that helps you set up a site quickly with pre-formatted pages and navigation elements, your service might create a sitemap for your automatically, and you don’t need to do anything. Search your service’s documentation for the word “sitemap” to see if a sitemap is generated automatically, or if they recommend creating your own (and if so, how to submit a sitemap on your hosting service).
Your site is comprehensively linked internally. This means that Google can find all the important pages on your site by following links starting from the homepage.
You don’t have many media files (video, image) or news pages that you need to appear in the index. Sitemaps can help Google find and understand video and image files, or news articles, on your site, if you want them to appear in Google Search results. If you don’t need these results to appear in Image, Video, or News results, you might not need a sitemap.

Refer: Google

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