Create a sitemap

What to do afterwards

The file belongs as sitemap.xml Then, in the robots.txt link to it – one line: Sitemap: https://beispiel.de/sitemap.xmlThat's where search engines look first.

The sitemap only includes pages that should also be included in the index: no redirects, no error pages, none that are excluded by noindex and none that point to another address via canonical.

Then it is worthwhile Countercheck with the Sitemap examiner – he reports duplicates, foreign hosts and addresses that are not reachable.

By hand or by being produced?

For a website that rarely changes, a hand-maintained file is perfectly fine—twenty addresses are inserted faster than any module set up. From the point where pages are added on a regular basis, this reverses: a sitemap that no one posts becomes the directory of what once existed, and then let the system create it to update itself.

The in-between is the search function at the top: letting you browse your own website, look through the found addresses, remove unwanted ones, download file. This is especially worthwhile after a remodel if you want to know which pages the crawler actually finds anyway.

Limits and specific cases

A sitemap can hold a maximum of 50,000 addresses and must not be larger than 50 MB. If you are above it, divide it and refer to the parts via an index file. Images and videos can be supplemented with their own details; for most websites this is of little use, for image galleries and portals quite something.

All the addresses of a sitemap must belong to the same domain as the file, and a foreign address in it is not a reference but an error. Google rejects such entries and reports them in the Search Console.