SEO for Solos
crawling

Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file listing a site's URLs with optional last-modified dates, change frequencies and priorities.

Why it matters

It is how a crawler discovers URLs that internal linking reaches slowly, and how you communicate which pages changed.

How it is measured

Fetch /sitemap.xml and check for duplicates, off-origin URLs and a lastmod distribution that is not one clustered build timestamp.

Checks that involve sitemap

Related terms

Questions

What is sitemap?

A sitemap is an XML file listing a site's URLs with optional last-modified dates, change frequencies and priorities.

Why does sitemap matter?

It is how a crawler discovers URLs that internal linking reaches slowly, and how you communicate which pages changed.

How is sitemap measured?

Fetch /sitemap.xml and check for duplicates, off-origin URLs and a lastmod distribution that is not one clustered build timestamp.