mozilla
XML Sitemap
Description
An XML Sitemap provides information about the pages and media available on your site. If a site contains a lot of media files, or publishes news content (PR updates are not news), then you may want to use a Sitemap to help Google find all of your URLs and to provide metadata about media or news content.
If you don't want to serve hreflang tags in your page HTML (e.g. to improve page load times), you can include them in the XML Sitemap.
Do not include <priority> or <changefreq> values in your Sitemap for SEO purposes: search engines do not use them.
Can a search engine use the XML Sitemap to find URLs that you haven't linked to by at least one other page? Yes, but any orphaned pages are unlikely to appear in search results; the SEO best practice is to link to content that you want users/search engines to find.
Is the XML Sitemap necessary if you have a site with interlinked pages, are not publishing a lot of media content, aren't a news publisher, and don't want to include hrefang tags? Well...no.
Success Criteria
- [ ] Are you sure you need an XML Sitemap?
- [ ] Submit your XML Sitemap at Google Search Console: Search results > Indexing > Sitemaps
- [ ] If you have video files, after 24-48 hours check the Sitemaps report in GSC to QA the number of videos discovered.
- [ ] If you are using this file to publish hreflang tags, then please see #16173
For context: Sitemaps are currently removed from robots.txt and served on custom URLs to not expose them to SEs: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/16208 — they are only being used by health check tooling https://github.com/mozmeao/www-site-checker/pull/545 and no longer intended as a SEO tool.
(However their utility in being the reference for hreflang alternates to make the served HTMLs smaller sounds still relevant.)
Since Sitemaps were removed, here are the observed differences: It may be that there is a delay in URLs being crawled. Monitor articles are taking as long as a week to be indexed. However, URLs are still being found, and increasing the speed at which they would have naturally been found in normal site crawls does not improve outcomes (ranking, click-through). In fact, seeing the speed at which new URLs are indexed gives us a more accurate picture of how interesting Google finds the site/this part of the site (i.e. not very, which we can improve upon with more/better content).