Sitemap
Website and technology
Website and technology
An XML sitemap is a list of the URLs you want indexed, meant for search engines.
It mainly helps large sites, new pages and pages with few internal links. A sitemap doesn't guarantee indexing, but it speeds up discovery.
Only include indexable pages: no redirects, no 404s and no noindexed pages. A polluted sitemap signals poor maintenance.
Related terms
- CrawlingCrawling is a search engine fetching your pages by following links. No crawl means no index, and no index means no ranking.
- IndexingIndexing is a crawled page being stored in the search engine's database. Only indexed pages can appear in results.
- robots.txtrobots.txt is a file in your site's root telling crawlers which parts they may and may not fetch.