XML Sitemap Generator

What a sitemap is for

It is a list of the pages you want found, in a format search engines read. It does not make pages rank, and a well-linked site is discovered without one. Where it earns its place is everywhere linking is thin: a new site with no inbound links, a page reachable only through a form, or a large site where crawlers might not get to everything.

Rules worth knowing

• Absolute URLs only, including the protocol. Relative paths are invalid.
• One entry per URL — duplicates are dropped here automatically, along with anything that is not a URL at all.
• Pick one canonical form and stay with it. Listing both example.com/page and www.example.com/page splits the signal.
• Fifty thousand URLs or fifty megabytes per file; past that, split it and use an index.
• Do not list pages you have blocked in robots.txt. The two contradict each other.

About lastmod

lastmod should say when the page's content last genuinely changed. Setting every page to today because it is easy teaches crawlers to ignore the field — and they do notice. Leave it out rather than making it up; the checkbox above is there so you can.

After you upload it

Put the file at your site root, add a Sitemap: line to robots.txt pointing at it, and submit it once in Google Search Console. There is nothing to repeat after that — it is re-read on its own.