What are the sitemaps?

Sitemap is an XML file that has article title, URL and published date of articles. This is a way for Google to easily fetch all the required pages of the website and get them indexed in Google. 

Example Sitemap XML

XML
Here is a very basic XML sitemap that includes the location of a single URL:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2022-06-04</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>
Note: News sitemap doesn’t require <lastmod>, it gives invalid node error when you use jetpack news-sitemap.xml.

Read more on

  • Sitemap Overview
  • Splitting big sitemaps
    The plugins like Yoast SEO or Jetpack or MSN sitemap have an option to split sitemap entries into chunks of 1000 or 500 per page
  • Google news sitemap
    This sitemap is most important for news industry. News sitemap is generally for keeping latest news, mainly from last 3 days on the shelf, so the news-sitemap will hold only last 3 days posts or articles in the sitemap. This sitemap is then read by bots to keep news floating on the news publications like Google news, MSN news, etc.