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.
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.