Table of Contents
What are XML sitemaps?
An XML sitemap is a file that provides a list of URLs for search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, to crawl. XML sitemaps can contain attributes that provide additional information about each URL to crawlers.
Why are XML sitemaps important for SEO?
There are many reasons why XML sitemaps are important for SEO, but the bottom line is that XML sitemaps help search engines discover your pages. Providing an XML sitemap will ensure that important pages on your website are crawled efficiently .
In fact, Gary Illyes, webmaster trends analyst at Google, said at the Sydney Search Marketing Conference that Googlebot uses sitemaps to discover content. 80% of discovery is following links, and about 20% is following sitemaps.
A quick note on crawl budget and XML sitemaps
Remember that a sitemap is a list of URLs for search engines to crawl. Therefore, it is essential that we talk about what a crawl budget is and how it affects XML sitemaps.
This is how Google defines crawl budget:
Taking crawl rate and crawl demand, it defines crawl budget as the number of URLs that Googlebot can and wants to crawl . The important thing to understand in the context of XML sitemaps is that Googlebot will only crawl a certain number of URLs, and this may not cover all of your URLs.
Providing XML sitemaps can use your crawl budget more efficiently, as Googlebot will know to crawl more important URLs you provide in the sitemap rather than low-value ones. XML sitemaps won’t prevent Google from crawling all low-value URLs, but they will provide an indication of which URLs Googlebot should focus on.
Submit your XML sitemaps to search engines
Best practice is to submit your XML sitemaps to search engines through their webmaster tools consoles. By doing this, you gain access to useful data such as errors, the date of the last crawl, and the number of URLs discovered.
Types of XML Sitemaps
For web content (for example, images and videos) there are two types of XML sitemaps: a sitemap index and a sitemap file. I’ll cover them briefly below, but be sure to check out the documentation for the major search engines:
Sitemap Index File
A sitemap index file is simply a sitemap for your sitemaps. Provides the location of a sitemap file and also when it was last modified.
http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz
2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00
http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz
2005-01-01
Sitemap File
A sitemap file is a list of URLs that you want Googlebot to crawl. The sitemap file contains additional information such as the date it was last modified, how often the content changes, and the priority on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0.
http://www.example.com/
2005-01-01
monthly </ change date >
0.8
6 tips to optimize your XML sitemap
Beyond having an XML sitemap, there are several things you can do to optimize it and improve its SEO performance.
Also Read: Complete list of Google Search Operators
1. Follow the sitemaps.org protocol
Before looking at any optimization tips, it is vital that your sitemaps follow the sitemps.org protocol so that search engines understand them.
For your XML sitemap to be accepted by the major search engines it must:
• Start with an opening tag and end with a closing tag.
• Specify the namespace (standard protocol) within the tag.
• Include an entry for each URL , as a parent XML tag.
• Includes a child entry for each parent tag.
2. Structure XML sitemaps by site section
One of my favorite use cases for XML sitemaps is to control valid and excluded URLs by site section in Google Search Console. To do this, you must create sitemap index files for each section of your website.
Here is an example of what it can look like:
• Index.xml
• products-index.xml
• product.xml
• product1.xml
• blog-index.xml
• blog.xml
• blog-1.xml
• directory-index.xml
• directory.xml
• directory-1.xml
Also Read: What is the URL and how does it influence SEO?
3. Include only your valuable pages
You only need to include in your sitemap XML files the URL that you want Googlebot to crawl, index, and rank. These pages are often called “ valuable pages” because they are the ones that provide benefits. There is no reason to include URLs in your sitemap that do not provide any SEO benefit to your website.
4. Avoid HTTP status codes other than ok (200)
Avoid including URLs that return a non-200 HTTP response code in your XML sitemap. Including non-200 responses is bad for your SEO because you are telling Googlebot that you want it to crawl these URLs even though they are wasting your crawl budget.
5. Avoid URLs without an index
URLs marked noindex have no place in your XML sitemaps (except in specific use cases). Noindex URLs will not bring you traffic from search engines, so there is no reason for Googlebot to crawl them once they have been removed from indexing.
Note : You can use a temporary XML sitemap if you want Google to see a no-index tag in a large number of URLs quickly.
6. Avoid URLs that canonize to another URL
URLs that are canonized to another URL also have no place in the XML sitemap. Like the noindex tag, you don’t want these URLs to rank in Google, so there’s no reason to tell Googlebot to crawl them.
