XML Sitemap Tips for Large Sites
Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2025 9:10 am
Most CMS have features that automatically update sitemaps when new URLs are created or existing pages are changed. For Google, the frequency of updates to the sitemap itself and the lastmod tag of the page can serve as a signal of freshness. Whether this is important for their ranking depends on the page and the context.
Think of an XML sitemap as a city map for tourists, with the city being your website and the tourists being Google — you want to make sure you only include important buildings, not every address. This is why unimportant pages shouldn't be included; examples are pages like your privacy policy or about us page. While these pages should be indexed, they don't need to be crawled very often and aren't important when we're talking about SEO.
In addition to meeting the standard requirements, there nepal mobile database is more you can do to up your sitemap game.
For example, a large site like a news publisher should use an index sitemap which contains up to 50,000 normal sitemaps and should not exceed 50mb. They are like an XML sitemap mothership that hosts many smaller sitemaps. Large sites need them because they can't fit into a single sitemap. You shouldn't try to fit everything into one sitemap anyway.
You can make the most of these sitemaps by structuring them by page type or topic. In practice, you will create a dedicated XML sitemap for each subdirectory or page template to understand the technical and indexing issues of your site.
<img alt="Sitemap xml submitted by GSC" class="zooming lazyloaded" data-src="s:static.semrushomcdn-cgiimagewidth=1010bloguploadsmedia436743675a97bc28b9f07152e28c9ab0bf50image1.png" data-gtm-vis-has-fired-9025619_57="1" src="s:static.semrushomcdn-cgiimagewidth=1010bloguploadsmedia436743675a9…image1 png.
Think of an XML sitemap as a city map for tourists, with the city being your website and the tourists being Google — you want to make sure you only include important buildings, not every address. This is why unimportant pages shouldn't be included; examples are pages like your privacy policy or about us page. While these pages should be indexed, they don't need to be crawled very often and aren't important when we're talking about SEO.
In addition to meeting the standard requirements, there nepal mobile database is more you can do to up your sitemap game.
For example, a large site like a news publisher should use an index sitemap which contains up to 50,000 normal sitemaps and should not exceed 50mb. They are like an XML sitemap mothership that hosts many smaller sitemaps. Large sites need them because they can't fit into a single sitemap. You shouldn't try to fit everything into one sitemap anyway.
You can make the most of these sitemaps by structuring them by page type or topic. In practice, you will create a dedicated XML sitemap for each subdirectory or page template to understand the technical and indexing issues of your site.
<img alt="Sitemap xml submitted by GSC" class="zooming lazyloaded" data-src="s:static.semrushomcdn-cgiimagewidth=1010bloguploadsmedia436743675a97bc28b9f07152e28c9ab0bf50image1.png" data-gtm-vis-has-fired-9025619_57="1" src="s:static.semrushomcdn-cgiimagewidth=1010bloguploadsmedia436743675a9…image1 png.