A short guide to XML sitemaps

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Everything we would tell a client about XML sitemaps in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What it costs to ignore

A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The practical version

Only list pages you actually want indexed. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Where it usually goes wrong

Keep it current or it works against you. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about XML sitemaps before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.