{"id":5489,"date":"2021-07-27T09:46:28","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T07:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/help.marketingminer.com\/?post_type=kb&p=5489"},"modified":"2021-08-06T14:44:18","modified_gmt":"2021-08-06T12:44:18","slug":"what-is-a-sitemap-and-how-to-create-one","status":"publish","type":"kb","link":"https:\/\/help.marketingminer.com\/en\/article\/what-is-a-sitemap-and-how-to-create-one\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a sitemap and how to create one"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A sitemap is an XML file<\/strong> that provides information about all the important pages, files, images, or videos on your website. It provides search engines with an overview of all available content that should be discovered, crawled, and indexed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It assists crawlers to understand what\u2019s on your website. It also helps to find pages that are not linked internally on the site. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s good practice to add your sitemap location to the robots.txt file<\/a>. Sitemap example: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sitemap: https:\/\/www.marketingminer.com\/sitemap.xml<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
How does an XML sitemap look like? <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Here\u2019s what a typical XML sitemap looks like: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Here\u2019s<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Many CMS create and manage sitemaps automatically and they can look a bit different. However, their purpose is always the same. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"YoastSEO<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
In the example above, you can see an automatically generated XML sitemap by YoastSEO<\/strong>, a WordPress plugin<\/strong>. Remember, it\u2019s not important how the sitemap looks like, it\u2019s all about the functionality. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sitemap index<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
All sitemaps are limited to a maximum of 50,000 URLs<\/strong>. If you exceed the limit, you will have to create a new one. If you break your list into multiple sitemaps, you can optionally create a sitemap index<\/strong>. A sitemap index is an XML file (same as a sitemap) that contains links to a number of sitemaps files. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s take a look at an XML sitemap example to analyze its parts in more detail:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n  <sitemapindex xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.sitemaps.org\/schemas\/sitemap\/0.9\">\n    <sitemap>\n      <loc>https:\/\/www.marketingminer.com\/sitemap1.xml<\/loc>\n    <\/sitemap>\n    <sitemap>\n      <loc>https:\/\/www.marketingminer.com\/sitemap2.xml.gz<\/loc>\n    <\/sitemap>\n  <\/sitemapindex>\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
URL set<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Every sitemap needs to have a <urlset><\/strong> tag that describes which version of the XML sitemap protocol standard is used. You will often see version 0.9 which is supported by most search engines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<urlset xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.sitemaps.org\/schemas\/sitemap\/0.9\"><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
URL<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Now we get to the most important part, the <url> <\/strong>tag. Every URL definition can contain the following tags:  <\/p>\n\n\n\n