Free Sitemap Generator

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all important pages of your website in a format that search engines can easily understand. Key benefits include:

• Faster discovery: Helps search engines find all your pages, especially new or deep content
• Priority signaling: Indicates which pages are most important and how often they change
• Indexing insights: Provides data about when pages were last updated
• Crawl optimization: Helps search engines use their crawl budget efficiently

While not a ranking factor, sitemaps significantly improve how search engines interact with your site.

Best Practice: Use both types - XML for search engines and HTML for users.

Update frequency depends on your website's content strategy:

Pro Tip: Automate sitemap generation for dynamic sites to ensure it always reflects current content.

For best results with search engines:

• Maximum URLs: 50,000 per sitemap (Google's limit)
• Maximum file size: 50MB uncompressed (10MB compressed)
• Large sites: Use a sitemap index file that references multiple sitemaps

Generally include:

• Important content pages
• Pages with few internal links
• New or recently updated pages
• Pages with valuable content

Generally exclude:

• Duplicate content (use canonical tags instead)
• Paginated pages (use rel="next/prev")
• Thin or low-quality content
• Pages blocked by robots.txt

Submit your sitemap through:

Also reference your sitemap in robots.txt:

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

The <priority> tag in sitemaps indicates the relative importance of pages (0.0 to 1.0). Key points:

• Not a ranking factor: Google states priorities don't affect rankings
• Relative only: Values only matter in relation to other pages in your sitemap
• Best practice: Use to highlight your most important pages (homepage, key category pages)
• Default: 0.5 if not specified

Note: While priorities don't directly impact rankings, they may influence crawl frequency.

The <changefreq> tag suggests how often pages are updated. Recommended settings:

Note: These are hints, not commands. Search engines may crawl at different frequencies.

Yes, you can and should use multiple sitemaps for:

• Large sites: Split by sections (products, blog posts, etc.)
• Different content types: Separate sitemaps for pages, images, videos
• Dynamic content: Different update frequencies

Use a sitemap index file to organize them:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-pages.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2023-10-15</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-images.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2023-10-15</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Validate your sitemap using these tools:

Common validation errors to avoid:

• Invalid XML syntax (unclosed tags, special characters)
• URLs that return errors (404, 500, etc.)
• URLs blocked by robots.txt
• Incorrect date formats in lastmod