Sitemap (XML Sitemap) is an XML-format file that presents search engines with a structured list of all important URLs on a website. It gives the crawler the message, “this is the map of the site; please crawl these pages.”
Sitemap XML structure:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://site.com/sayfa/</loc>
<lastmod>2026-01-15</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>Types of sitemaps:
- URL Sitemap: Standard page list.
- Image Sitemap: List of images.
- Video Sitemap: List of video content.
- News Sitemap: Content from the last 48 hours for news sites.
- Sitemap Index: A parent sitemap that brings together multiple sitemaps.
A single sitemap can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs or 50 MB; for larger sites, a sitemap index should be used.
Tip: Submit your sitemap to Search Console and also add it to robots.txt. Your sitemap should include only canonical, indexable pages that return 200 OK; it should not contain 404, 301, or noindex pages.