Sitemaps direct Google (and other search engines) to the most important pages on your website, allowing them to crawl and index them. However, Google cannot find all content in this manner, and if a web page is not linked to other known pages, it will not be found. If a URL is discovered that is not already in their search index, they can parse its contents and index it where appropriate. They pay attention to internal and external links on a page when crawling it. Google says they ignore the tag because it’s just a “bag of noise.”įor, John Mueller says, “Priority and change frequency doesn’t play that much of a role with Sitemaps anymore.”Ĭrawling the web is how Google finds new content. Google’s Gary Ilyes states that they ignore in most cases because “webmasters are doing a terrible job keeping it accurate.” It’s easy to see why most sitemap generators set this to the current date for all pages rather than the date the file was last modified. None of these optional tags are particularly relevant to SEO. Always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never are all valid values. Its purpose is to inform search engines how frequently they should crawl the URL. Higher is preferable.Ĭhangefreq>: Indicates how frequently the page is likely to be updated.
lastmod>: Indicates when the file was last modified.It is critical that these are absolute, not relative, canonical URLs.Īlthough this is the only mandatory tag, in this case, there are a few optional properties: The URL’s location must be specified in a nested loc> tag. Most sitemaps adhere to the Sitemap 0.90 standard, supported by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. This is a container for all of the sitemap’s URLs, and it also informs crawlers about the protocol standard in use. The sitemap version should be 1.0, and the encoding should be UTF8. It also specifies the XML version and character encoding. This informs search engines that they are currently reading an XML file. They can look a bit daunting if you’ve never seen one before. XML sitemaps are made for search engines, not humans. However, having a sitemap will be extremely beneficial if you have a large site with thousands, if not millions/billions, of URLs.
If you have a small site (100 URLs) linked internally, you probably don’t need a sitemap. The short answer is that it does not depend on the size of your site or how it is built. The XML format is the most widely used and will focus on the rest of this blog. Sitemaps can be created in various formats, including XML (Extensible Markup Language), RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and Text. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.” “.a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. A sitemap isn’t the only way for search engines to find pages on your site, but it is your “direct line” to Google about what’s important. Creating and submitting a sitemap is one of the best ways to ensure that search engines find all of your site’s valuable content.
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