XML Sitemap
A machine-readable list of the canonical, indexable URLs on a site, submitted to search engines to aid discovery.
An XML sitemap is a structured file listing the URLs on a site that you want search engines to know about, optionally with each URL's last modification date. It doesn't guarantee indexing, but it helps engines discover pages — especially on large sites or ones with weak internal linking — and it's submitted through Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
A sitemap should contain only canonical, indexable, path-based URLs that each return 200. Listing redirects, noindexed pages, 404s, or the same content under many query-string variants sends conflicting signals and wastes the engine's trust in the file. A sitemap full of parameterized near-duplicate URLs is one of the clearest ways to hand a spam classifier a list of pages to demote.
Keep the sitemap in sync with reality: the URLs in it should match the self-referential canonicals on the pages and the links in your navigation. A clean, path-based, body-unique sitemap is a quiet but important quality signal.
Related terms
- Canonical Tag — A rel="canonical" link that names the preferred URL for a page, telling search engines which version to index when duplicates exist.
- Crawl Budget — The finite attention search engines spend crawling a site. Matters mainly for large sites; wasted on junk URLs, it starves real pages.
- Indexing — Storing a crawled page in a search engine's index so it can appear in results. Crawled is not the same as indexed.
- robots.txt — A file at the site root that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing.