A How question

How does an SEO company handle XML sitemaps?

3 min read Cites 1 source

As a maintained file rather than a one-time setup. An XML sitemap lists the URLs you want search engines to know about. It does not control rankings and does not force pages into the index; it is a signal about which addresses exist and matter. The company’s job is to make that signal accurate: only the right URLs, generated automatically as the site changes, within the size limits, submitted where Google can find it, and checked against what Google actually indexes.

What the file should contain

Google’s guide to building and submitting a sitemap asks for complete addresses, because “Google will attempt to crawl your URLs exactly as listed.” It also says to include the URLs you want to see in Google’s search results. In practice that means canonical URLs that return a 200 status and are meant to be indexed. Pages marked noindex, URLs that redirect, pages blocked by robots.txt, duplicate versions, and low-value pages such as internal search results do not belong there. Listing a noindex page or a redirected address in the sitemap tells search engines two contradictory things, so the sitemap should agree with your canonical tags and internal links.

The fields Google reads, and the ones it ignores

The same guide states that Google ignores the priority and changefreq values in a sitemap. It uses the lastmod date only when that date is consistently and verifiably accurate, and the date should reflect the last significant update to the page, such as a change to the main content, the structured data, or the links. A sitemap generator that stamps every page with today’s date on every run, or a team that fills in priority values by hand, is spending effort on fields that do not help. A company should check how your platform sets lastmod and fix it if it changes when the page has not.

Keeping it current

A sitemap is useful only if it matches the site as it is now. On a site that publishes or changes pages regularly, the company sets up a sitemap generated by your platform or a plugin so that it updates as pages are added, removed, or changed, and then checks the generator’s settings, since defaults can include pages that should be left out. Periodic audits catch deleted pages still listed, URLs that have started redirecting, and pages recently set to noindex.

Size limits and index files

According to the guide, a single sitemap is limited to 50MB uncompressed or 50,000 URLs, and a site with more must split its sitemap into several files. A sitemap index file then lists the individual sitemaps so that one address can be submitted. Splitting by content type, such as products, articles, and core pages, also makes problems easier to locate, and the guide notes that submitting several sitemaps can be useful for tracking the search performance of each one.

Submitting and monitoring

The company submits the sitemap or index file in Search Console’s Sitemaps report and adds a Sitemap line to robots.txt. Google is clear about what submission does: “submitting a sitemap is merely a hint: it doesn’t guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on the site.” The monitoring is the useful part. The Sitemaps report shows when Googlebot read the file and any processing errors, and comparing the URLs you submitted with what the Page indexing report shows as indexed points to the pages that need attention.

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