XML sitemap

Google says you might not need one if your site has about 500 pages or fewer that you want in search, every page is reachable through links from your other pages, and you don't depend on lots of videos or images showing up in search. It suggests one when a site is large, or new with few links from other sites.

A sitemap is a hint, not an order: Google says not every address in it will necessarily be crawled and indexed. Most website builders and blog platforms make one for you, so the job is usually to find it and submit it. If pages are still missing from Google, our guide to why a site is not on Google covers the other causes.

1. Find its address. Try yoursite.com/sitemap.xml in the browser. If nothing opens, look in your website builder's SEO settings, or for a Sitemap line in your robots.txt file.
2. In Google Search Console, open Sitemaps (under Indexing), paste the address into Add a new sitemap and click Submit.
3. Check the status. Success means Google read it, Has errors or Couldn't fetch means it could not, and Discovered pages is how many addresses it found.
4. In the Page indexing report, filter by that sitemap to see how many of its pages are actually indexed.

• Listing addresses you don't want in Google, such as redirects, error pages or test pages. Google says to include the addresses you want to see in results.
• Addresses in the wrong form, such as http when the site runs on https. Google crawls them exactly as listed.
• Fussing over priority and change frequency: Google ignores both. It uses the last modified date only when it is consistently accurate.