SEO Sitemap Best Practices for Better Indexing
An XML sitemap is a roadmap for search engines. It lists all important URLs and provides metadata about each one. A well-maintained sitemap helps Google discover new content faster. Use our Sitemap Generator to create one from your URL list.
What Goes in a Sitemap
Include canonical, indexable pages only. Exclude redirected URLs, duplicate pages, paginated archives, and pages blocked by robots.txt. Quality over quantity: a sitemap with 500 high-value pages is better than one with 50,000 thin pages.
Sitemap Fields
- loc: The full, canonical URL (required)
- lastmod: Last modification date in YYYY-MM-DD format
- changefreq: How often the page changes (always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never)
- priority: 0.0 to 1.0, relative to other pages on your site
Sitemap Size Limits
Maximum 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed per sitemap file. For larger sites, split into multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file.
Multilingual Sitemaps
For sites with multiple languages, include hreflang annotations in your sitemap. Use our Hreflang Sitemap Generator to create sitemap entries with xhtml:link elements.
Common Mistakes
Including redirected URLs, forgetting to update lastmod dates, listing noindex pages, using wrong priorities (every page priority 1.0), not compressing large sitemaps.
Key Takeaways
Include only canonical URLs, keep sitemaps under 50MB/50K URLs, use lastmod accurately, and submit to Google Search Console. Use our Sitemap Generator for error-free XML.
Generate sitemaps with our free Sitemap Generator.