Sitemap Generator (Lite)

A sitemap is a discovery aid, not a ranking factor

Submitting a sitemap does not make pages rank and does not guarantee indexing. It helps search engines find URLs, which matters most for large sites, sites with weak internal linking, and new sites with few inbound links. For a well-linked twenty-page site it changes almost nothing. Its real value on a large site is diagnostic: Search Console reports indexed versus submitted per sitemap, so splitting by section tells you which part of the site is failing to get indexed.

Only include URLs you want indexed

This is the rule most sitemaps break. Every URL listed should return 200, be canonical to itself, and be indexable. Including a URL that redirects, 404s, is blocked in robots.txt, or carries a noindex tag creates a direct contradiction, and Search Console reports it as an error. A page canonicalised to another URL should not be listed either; list the canonical target instead.

lastmod only helps if it is honest

Google has said it uses lastmod when it is consistently accurate. A build process that stamps today's date on all 1,000 URLs on every deploy teaches crawlers the field is meaningless, and they stop using it. Set lastmod from the date the page content genuinely changed, and omit it entirely rather than faking it.

changefreq and priority are ignored

Google has confirmed it does not use either. Priority values are relative within your own site and were always self-reported, so they carried no information. Emitting them on every URL adds bytes and no signal. Keep loc and lastmod, drop the rest.

Limits and splitting

A single sitemap holds 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Beyond that you need multiple files referenced from a sitemap index. Splitting well below the limit is often worth it anyway, by section rather than arbitrarily, purely for the per-sitemap indexing report.

Submitting

Reference the sitemap from robots.txt with an absolute URL, which every major engine reads, and submit it in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Resubmitting after every change is unnecessary; crawlers re-fetch it periodically.