A sitemap is a roadmap of your website that leads Google directly to your core content. For large sites, sitemaps are the single most important tool to direct search crawl budget, ensuring that your best pages are crawled frequently while low-value pages are ignored.
What goes in a premium XML sitemap?
Keep your sitemap clean. The most common indexing error is including pages that are redirected, block crawlers, or have canonical tags pointing elsewhere.
- HTTP Status Code: Only include pages that return a
200 OKstatus. - No Robots Blockages: Do not include pages blocked by
robots.txt. - Canonical URLs: Only include the self-referencing canonical version of each URL. Never include duplicate query-parameter variations.