What it does
An XML sitemap lists the pages you want search engines to find. It doesn't make a page rank, but it helps crawlers discover new and deep pages sooner, and it says which addresses are the real ones.
Point this generator at your homepage and it follows links on the same host, up to 25 pages, leaving out anything that shouldn't be listed. Or paste the URLs you already have and download them as a valid file.
How to use it
- 1Under Start from, pick Crawl my site, or Paste URLs if you already have a list.
- 2To crawl, enter your Homepage and press Crawl up to 25 pages. A Left out table gives the reason for each page it skipped.
- 3Review the URLs, one per line box and edit it freely. Lines that aren't URLs are skipped and duplicates are dropped.
- 4Tick or untick Add today's date as lastmod, then Copy or Download sitemap.xml and upload it to the root of your site.
What belongs in a sitemap
List the final, indexable address of each page. The crawl applies these rules for you: it reads robots.txt first, skips nofollow links and files such as images and PDFs, and drops query strings.
- Leave out redirects. List the address they end at.
- Leave out pages marked noindex, and pages whose canonical points elsewhere.
- Leave out anything robots.txt blocks.
- Use full URLs on one protocol and host, such as https://example.com/pricing.
Size limits and lastmod
One sitemap file can hold up to 50,000 URLs and be at most 50 MB uncompressed. Bigger sites split pages across several files and list them in a sitemap index.
Google uses lastmod only when it's consistently accurate. Today's date on every URL is fine for a first sitemap; after that, give each page the date it really changed, or leave lastmod out.
After you upload it
Add a line like Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml to robots.txt, and submit the file in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both report how many listed pages they indexed. If your CMS can generate a sitemap on every build, use that to keep it current.
Questions
Why did the crawl stop at 25 pages?
The free crawl reads at most 25 pages so it stays quick, and says how many links it didn't follow. For a bigger site, paste your full URL list or generate the sitemap from your CMS.
Why is a page I expected missing?
Check the Left out table: usually a redirect, noindex, a canonical to another URL, a robots.txt rule or an error status. A page no link points to can't be found by a crawl, so add it by hand.
Does a sitemap help my pages rank?
Not directly. It helps search engines discover and recrawl pages. Ranking still depends on the content and the links pointing to it.
Do I need priority or changefreq?
No. Only loc is required. Google ignores priority and changefreq, so this generator leaves them out.