What Exactly Is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is a file that contains details about the pages on your website and the interconnections between them.
Search engines such as Google use sitemaps to crawl your site more effectively. A sitemap informs Google about the important pages on your site and offers useful information about these files, like when the page was last updated, how often the page is modified, and if there are any alternate language versions of the page.
Do I Need a Sitemap?
As per Google, if your site's pages are appropriately linked, Google can generally discover most of your site. However, a sitemap can enhance the crawling of larger, more complex sites or more specialized files.
Having a sitemap doesn't assure that all items in it will be crawled and indexed since Google processes rely on intricate algorithms to schedule crawling. Nevertheless, in most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap, and it will never negatively impact your site.
You might need a sitemap if:
Your site is really large and Google web crawlers might miss out on crawling some of your new or recently updated pages.
Your site has a vast archive of content pages that are remote or not well linked.
Your site is new and has few external links to it.
Your site has a lot of rich media content (video, images) or is shown in Google News.
You might not need a sitemap if:
Your site is "small". By small, we mean about 500 pages or less on your site.
You're using a simple site hosting service like Blogger or Wix which might generate a sitemap for your site automatically.
Your site is comprehensively linked internally, ensuring Google can find all the important pages.
You don't have many media files or news pages that need to appear in the index.
How Do I Submit a Sitemap to Google?
Google doesn't check a sitemap every time a site is crawled. Instead, a sitemap is checked only the first time Google encounters it and afterward only when you notify Google about changes to your sitemap. Inform Google about a sitemap only when it's new or updated.
You can make your sitemap available to Google in a few different ways:
Submit it to Google via the Search Console Sitemaps report
Include the line "Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml" in your robots.txt file
Use the "ping" service to request Google to crawl the sitemap.