XML Sitemap

December 10, 2018

An XML sitemap lists all the important pages in your website so that Google or another search engine can more quickly crawl your content and find these pages — even if your links aren’t picture perfect.

XML Sitemap: What is it?

Technically, an XML sitemap is a file on your website that lists all the important URLs. It acts like a map that helps search engines like Google crawl your web content more intelligently.

There are many plugins that can help your website automatically generate an XML sitemap, which should relieve you from having to create one manually.

The XML Sitemap Benefits Which Types of Websites?

The websites that benefit the most from XML sitemaps are those that are:

  • Very large
  • Have huge archives of content
  • Contain rich media content
  • New websites with only a few external links pointing to it

Making Your XML Sitemap Show Certain Pages

If you want a visitor to land on one of your pages, it should be listed in your XML sitemap.

If you don’t want anyone to find or land on one of your pages, you need to add a “noindex, follow” tag, which disallows search engines from adding your page to their index. In short, it tells the engine not to show the page in search engine results pages.

Read More About the XML Sitemap

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