A sitemap is a list of the pages on your site that you want search engines to know about. It does not change your rankings on its own — it makes your site easier to discover and crawl, which matters most for large sites, brand-new sites, and pages that are not well linked from elsewhere.
The guides below cover each piece in turn. Start with the XML format, then branch into the specialised sitemaps for images, video and news, and the housekeeping topics — size limits, robots.txt and submission — that keep everything running smoothly.
What is an XML sitemap?
How the XML sitemap protocol works, what each tag means, and why search engines rely on it to crawl your site.
ReadHTML sitemaps explained
The human-facing cousin of the XML sitemap: a single page that links to everything, helping both visitors and crawlers.
ReadImage sitemaps explained
How to tell Google about the images on your pages so they can surface in Google Images.
ReadVideo sitemaps explained
Describe the videos you host — title, duration, thumbnail — so search engines can index and preview them.
ReadNews sitemaps explained
A fast-moving sitemap for publishers that feeds fresh articles to Google News within the last two days.
ReadSitemap index files
How to split a large site across many sitemaps and tie them together with a single index file.
ReadSitemap size and URL limits
The 50,000-URL and 50 MB ceilings every sitemap must respect, and what to do when you outgrow them.
Readrobots.txt and sitemaps
How the robots.txt file steers crawlers and advertises where your sitemap lives.
ReadBroken links and crawl errors
What 404s and dead links cost you, how crawlers find them, and how to keep your sitemap clean.
ReadSubmitting your sitemap to search engines
Where to put your sitemap and how to hand it to Google and Bing so your pages get discovered faster.
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