XML Sitemap Validator

An XML sitemap is a structured file that provides search engines with a comprehensive list of URLs on your website that you want indexed. Think of it as a roadmap for crawlers -- instead of relying solely on link discovery to find your pages, search engines can use your sitemap to quickly identify every important URL, its last modification date, and its relative importance within your site hierarchy.

While sitemaps do not directly influence rankings, they play a critical role in ensuring complete and efficient crawling. For large websites with thousands of pages, new websites with few inbound links, sites with complex architectures, or pages that are not well-interlinked, a sitemap can mean the difference between pages being discovered in hours versus weeks -- or not being discovered at all.

Anatomy of an XML Sitemap

Every XML sitemap begins with an XML declaration and a <urlset> root element that includes the sitemap protocol namespace. Inside the urlset, each page is represented by a <url> element containing up to four child elements:

<loc> is the only required element. It contains the absolute URL of the page. URLs must start with http:// or https:// and should match your canonical URLs exactly. If your site uses https, all URLs in the sitemap should use https. If you use www, all URLs should include www. Consistency matters because mismatches between sitemap URLs and canonical URLs waste crawl budget.

<lastmod> indicates when the page content was last meaningfully changed. This is the most valuable optional element because it helps search engines prioritize which pages to re-crawl. The key word is "meaningfully" -- updating a sidebar widget or footer should not change the lastmod date. Only update it when the primary content of the page changes. Use W3C Datetime format (YYYY-MM-DD at minimum).

<changefreq> provides a hint about how often the page content changes. Valid values are always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never. Google has publicly stated that it largely ignores this field, relying instead on its own crawl data to determine update frequency. Including it does not hurt, but do not expect it to influence crawl behavior.

<priority> assigns a relative importance score from 0.0 to 1.0 within your own site. This tells search engines which of your pages you consider most important. Like changefreq, Google largely ignores this field. However, some other search engines may use it as a tiebreaker when deciding crawl order.

Types of Sitemaps

Beyond standard URL sitemaps, the sitemap protocol supports several specialized formats. Image sitemaps help search engines discover images, particularly those loaded via JavaScript or CSS that crawlers might not find through standard HTML parsing. Video sitemaps provide metadata about video content including title, description, duration, and thumbnail URL. News sitemaps are specifically for Google News publishers and must contain articles published within the last 48 hours.

For sites with more than 50,000 URLs, you need a sitemap index file. This master file references multiple child sitemaps, each containing up to 50,000 URLs. A common approach is to split sitemaps by content type (one for pages, one for blog posts, one for products) or by URL structure (one per section of the site).

Sitemap Best Practices

Only include URLs that return a 200 status code and are the canonical version of the page. Do not include redirected URLs, URLs with noindex tags, pages blocked by robots.txt, or parameter-based duplicate URLs. Your sitemap should be a curated list of your most important, indexable pages -- not a dump of every URL your CMS generates.

Submit your sitemap through Google Search Console and reference it in your robots.txt file using the Sitemap directive. Monitor the sitemap coverage report in Search Console to identify pages that were submitted but not indexed -- this often reveals technical issues like crawl errors, redirect chains, or content quality problems that need attention. A well-maintained sitemap is a cornerstone of technical SEO. For a comprehensive review of your site's indexing health, consider our SEO audit service.