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Basics · 2 min

Sitemap checklist

Five rules that make every crawl count.

  1. 1

    Only pages you want found

    No redirects, errors, copies or noindex pages.

  2. 2

    Real "last changed" dates

    Only update the date when the page really changed.

  3. 3

    Split big sitemaps

    Up to 50,000 pages per file, joined by a sitemap index.

  4. 4

    Link it from robots.txt

    Add one line: Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

  5. 5

    Keep pages fast

    Under 3 seconds, with no server errors.

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