A sitemap is a valuable file that contains information about the pages on your website and their connections. It plays a crucial role in helping search engines, like Google, understand and crawl your site more effectively. By providing details about your site's important pages, such as the last update, frequency of changes, and alternate language versions, a sitemap assists search engines in indexing your content accurately.
A sitemap can be beneficial for your website in various scenarios. Firstly, if your site is extensive or complex, a sitemap can assist search engines like Google in efficiently crawling all your pages. It ensures that even new or recently updated pages are not overlooked. Additionally, if your site contains a large archive of content pages that may not be well-linked, a sitemap helps Google discover and index these isolated pages.
Moreover, a sitemap is useful for new sites with few external links. Since web crawlers rely on links to navigate the web, having a sitemap ensures that Google can find and index your pages, even if they have not been linked by other sites. Lastly, if your site contains a substantial amount of rich media content, such as videos or images, or if it is listed in Google News, providing additional information through a sitemap can aid in optimizing search results.
However, there are cases where a sitemap may not be necessary. If your site is relatively small, consisting of around 500 pages or less, it is likely that Google can discover all the important pages by following internal links. Similarly, if you are using a simple site hosting service like Blogger or Wix, the platform may automatically generate a sitemap for you. Furthermore, if your site does not have many media files or news pages that need to appear in search results, a sitemap might not to be required.
In summary, while a sitemap can enhance the crawling and indexing process, its necessity depends on factors such as the size and complexity of your site, the linking structure, and the presence of rich media or news content.
Google does not check a sitemap every time it crawls a site. Instead, the search engine only verifies the sitemap's presence during the initial discovery and subsequently when you notify Google of any changes by pinging them. It is important to inform Google about a new or updated sitemap, but unnecessary to submit or ping unchanged sitemaps repeatedly.
To make your sitemap accessible to Google, there are several methods you can employ:
Submit it to Google using the Search Console Sitemaps report
Insert the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap:Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml
Use the "ping" service to request Google to crawl the sitemap. Send an HTTP GET request like this:http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=<complete_url_of_sitemap>for example:http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml
