What a sitemap does
A sitemap gives Google a list of the pages you consider important. Google uses it to discover URLs it might miss through links alone. Including a page in a sitemap is also a weak signal that it is the preferred, canonical version.
Google is clear about the limits. A sitemap does not guarantee that Google crawls or indexes every listed page. Pages still need to be useful and linked from your site.
Who needs one
Google says you might not need a sitemap if your site has about 500 pages or fewer and links them all well. Sitemaps matter most for large sites, new sites with few links, and sites with lots of images, videos or news. We add one to every site anyway, because it costs nothing and helps Search Console report on your pages.
What to put in it
- Only pages you want in Google, each with a 200 status
- The canonical version of each URL, in full
- An accurate last-modified date for each page
- No redirects, noindex pages or blocked URLs
Google ignores the priority and changefreq fields. It uses lastmod only when it is consistently accurate, so update it when the main content changes, not on every deploy. One sitemap file can hold up to 50,000 URLs or 50MB. Larger sites split into several files listed in a sitemap index.
How to submit and check it
Add the sitemap address to robots.txt and submit it in the Sitemaps report in Search Console. The report shows when Google last read it and how many URLs it found. Then compare that list with the Page indexing report to see which listed pages stayed out.
Our sites split sitemaps by page type, so Search Console shows coverage for services, locations and answers separately. Our technical SEO work sets this up for every client site.