Best Practices for XML Sitemaps
An XML (extensible markup language) sitemap is a website file that lists pages you want search engines to index. It’s not a requirement, especially for smaller websites; and if you’re using a CMS like WordPress, Wix, Shopify, or Squarespace, you don’t have to worry about it. But for minimal effort, it can give your SEO a boost. So, here’s some best practices for creating sitemaps:
- Include only those URLs you want to be indexed by search engines, and those which return a 200 status code (no redirects or error status codes).
- Your sitemap files should not exceed 50MB or 50,000 URLs. When multiple sitemaps are required, use a sitemap index to list all of them.
- Make sure your sitemap is UTF-8 encoded.
- Include links to localized version(s) of each URL.
- Update your sitemap with new URLs, and document when old URLs have last been updated (the “lastmod” attribute).
- Link to your sitemap from your robots.txt file.
- Submit your sitemap to Google via the Google Search Console.
You can create an XML sitemap manually or use a generator tool that updates your file automatically. Visit Semrush to get started on yours.
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