Site map. Quick guide.

To help search robots correctly index your site, you need to generate a site map. It is especially useful for large sites. With it, potentially in-demand pages that search engines did not have time to find can get into the index.

Site map in 2 words

The link to the site map is specified in the file robots.txt the following directive:

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

In general, the file format looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
 <url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com</loc>
 <priority>1.00</priority>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
 </url>
 ...
</urlset>

Recommendations for setting up a site map

The ‘` tag indicates the importance of the page. They will be processed by search engines first. Search engines are constantly experimenting with search results, rotating pages in search results. You can say that they are trying to find viewers for your pages. The number of such experiments is limited. By specifying a high priority, you are telling the search engine: “Buddy, according to my calculations, it will be easier to find viewers for this page, take time for it first, and not for other pages.”

The <priority> tag can take a value from 0.0 to 1.0. Think carefully about which pages of your site contain the most interesting and unique content and specify the highest priority for them. And search engines will look for a suitable place for them in the search results.

The <changefreq> tag indicates the approximate refresh rate of the page and can take the values never, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, and always. If you have a large site with tens of thousands of pages, then using this tag you can properly redistribute the limited resources of the search engine.

The ‘` tag contains a link to the page. The link protocol must match the protocol of your site. That is, if your site starts with https, then the links should start with https.

The site map should not include links that have been closed from indexing in the file robots.txt .

The size of the site map file should not exceed 2 MB. If you have a lot of pages, split them into several files.