XML sitemaps

A sitemap is a file that lists the URLs you want search engines to discover. It does not force crawling or indexing. Google calls it a hint, and treats sitemap inclusion as a weak canonical signal. It helps most on large sites, new sites with few links, and sites with pages that are poorly linked internally.

What a good sitemap contains

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/paslaugos/remontas/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-10-28</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Only list URLs that:

• return 200,
• are not noindexed,
• are their own canonical,
• are not blocked by robots.txt.

Generate, do not hand-write

Sitemaps should come from the same data that builds your pages, so they update automatically:

• PrestaShop: the Google sitemap module (gsitemap), with regeneration scheduled after catalogue changes.
• WordPress: core serves /wp-sitemap.xml. SEO plugins replace it with their own.
• Shopify: generated automatically at /sitemap.xml.
• Next.js: app/sitemap.ts. SEO-L itself does this, and keeps its sitemap empty while the site is noindexed.

Submitting

1. Search Console, then Sitemaps: submit the sitemap or sitemap index URL.
2. Add a line to robots.txt: Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml.
3. Bing Webmaster Tools: submit it there too, or import from Search Console.

The Sitemaps report shows when Google last read the file, its status, and how many URLs it discovered. Open the "Pages" view from a sitemap to see the indexing status of just those URLs. That is a quick way to check your important pages.

Special sitemaps

• Image sitemaps can list images, including images hosted on other domains such as a CDN.
• Video and news sitemaps exist for those content types.
• Hreflang in sitemaps: language alternates can be listed in the sitemap instead of in the HTML (covered in the international SEO lesson).