SEO glossary
Sitemap
A sitemap is a file listing the URLs on your site that you want search engines to know about, usually as XML at a fixed address like /sitemap.xml.
Its job is discovery, not persuasion. A sitemap helps a crawler find pages it might otherwise reach slowly or not at all — new pages, pages with few internal links, a large site with deep sections. It does not make a page rank and it does not guarantee indexing.
What belongs in it: canonical URLs that return 200 and that you want indexed. What does not: redirects, noindex pages, pages blocked in robots.txt, and parameter variants. A sitemap full of URLs Google is being told elsewhere to ignore is a set of contradictory instructions, which is worse than a short honest list.
The single most useful thing about one is diagnostic. Submit it in Search Console and the coverage report tells you how many of the URLs you nominated actually got indexed — the gap between those two numbers is usually where the real problem is.
Common question
- Do I need a sitemap?
- A small, well-linked site can be crawled fully without one. It earns its place as sites grow, and the Search Console coverage report it unlocks is worth having either way.
Check this on your own site
- Site Audit
Crawl your site and group what is broken
- GSC Insights
Search Console data, free on every plan
Definitions are the easy part
The free plan opens every tool with 500 credits and no card, so you can see these numbers on your own site rather than in an example.
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