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By Fadhil Abdulla

XML Sitemaps: What to Include, What Google Ignores, and How to Submit Yours

How sitemaps help search engines find your pages, which tags actually matter, common mistakes, and how to create and submit a sitemap.xml.

Editorial disclosure: Pyalm publishes and maintains the products and free tools discussed on this site. Regulatory statements are linked to primary sources where applicable. No independent professional review is claimed unless a reviewer is explicitly named.

An XML sitemap is a list of the URLs you want search engines to index, with the date each last changed. It won't make a weak page rank, but it helps search engines discover pages faster and more completely — especially on new sites, large sites, and pages with few internal links.

A minimal sitemap

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-10-16</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Which tags matter

Tag Google's view
<loc> Required — the canonical URL
<lastmod> Used, if consistently accurate
<changefreq> Ignored
<priority> Ignored

Bing and others may still read changefreq and priority, so they're harmless to include.

What to include — and leave out

Include: canonical, indexable pages that return 200 — home, services, products, blog posts, location pages.

Leave out: redirects, 404s, noindex pages, duplicate URLs with tracking parameters, cart/checkout/account pages, and staging URLs.

Create a sitemap

Most CMSs and frameworks generate one automatically (this site's is built from its pages and posts). For a static site or a quick fix:

  1. Export your URLs from your CMS, a crawler or Search Console.
  2. Paste them into the free XML Sitemap Generator, one per line.
  3. Set lastmod, and optionally changefreq and priority.
  4. Download sitemap.xml — or a ZIP with a sitemap index if you have more than 50,000 URLs.

The generator removes duplicates, rejects invalid URLs, and warns if URLs belong to a different host.

Submit it

  1. Upload to your site root: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.
  2. Add Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml to robots.txt — the Robots.txt Generator does this.
  3. Submit in Google Search Console → Sitemaps, and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Limits

50,000 URLs or 50 MB (uncompressed) per sitemap. Above that, split into several files and list them in a sitemap index.

SEO and infrastructure, built in

Pyalm builds SEO-first websites for businesses in India and the UAE — technical SEO, structured data, sitemaps, correct DNS and email authentication, and fast hosting — so these checks pass from day one.

WHOIS Lookup | DNS Lookup | Sitemap Generator | Robots.txt Generator | SERP Preview | All free tools

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Try the free XML Sitemap Generator

Pyalm builds SEO-first websites for businesses in India and the UAE — technical SEO, structured data, fast hosting and the right DNS and email setup from day one.

Open XML Sitemap Generator See website development All free tools