A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl and index all of your website's content. Sitemaps also tell search engines which pages on your website are most important. There are four majo types of Sitemaps: Normal XML Sitemap: This is by far the common type of Sitemap.
How to Add a Sitemap on the Google Search Console (Step by Step)
Sitemaps are very important tool for getting your site easily discovered by different search engines. You can also add a sitemap to Google Search Console to improve the indexing of your site.
For SEO, having a sitemap is essential to getting your important pages indexed, so you can see which pages are valuable, and index them regularly so that only your most up-to-date content appears in search results. If your website drops out of search results, even briefly, you can lose rankings and it can take a long time to regain it. Sitemaps are a great way to ensure a stable index.
So we have prepared a simple guide on how to add a sitemap to Google Search Console.
But first, what is Search Console and what is it for?
Search Console used to be called Webmaster Tools, but has since been renamed. It works as a free tool that allows business owners, marketers, and webmasters to understand how their site is performing in Google's search index, as well as providing them with resources to maintain a healthy site and resolve issues as they arise. It also allows Google to notify Google of potential problems or notify site owners of penalties.
There is also a built-in way to add a sitemap to Google Search Console.
What exactly is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a file you place on your domain with information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site and the relationships between them. Google can read this file and use it as a quick and easy directory to find and crawl pages on your website. It can also tell Google: when the page was last updated, how often the page changes and any alternative language versions of the page. This is a critical part of how Googlebot crawls and indexes. Googlebot relies on href links to jump from page to page, and a sitemap is a way to give Googlebot a nice, clean and simple list of each one.
This is an important part of search engine optimization because the ability to improve rankings and increase search traffic begins with indexing. As online businesses and websites create an SEO strategy, it is very important to ensure that your site (and all of your products) can appear in search.
Without a sitemap, it's possible that your SEO could be seriously subpar.
Read our step-by-step guide to adding a sitemap to Google Search Console. But first, it's important to know what sitemaps are and why/if you need them.
Need to add a sitemap to Search Console?
Technically no. If you want your business to appear in Google search, you can do nothing and let Google find and discover your website naturally. For smaller or medium-sized sites, this will work (but it will be slower). In these cases, a sitemap may not even be necessary.
However, at the end of the day, there is no downside.
For larger sites, you may need a sitemap to avoid unreliable indexing, missing pages from Google's index, or deeply cached pages that aren't indexed at all.
If your website is linked and can be accessed from other areas of the web, Google can usually discover most of your website. However, a sitemap can improve browsing and reduce server resources.
Recommendations for when it makes sense to submit a sitemap:
Your site is really big. The larger your site, the more likely Googlebot will miss some pages, especially for large sites like e-commerce sites or marketplaces.
Your website has a large archive of content pages, isolated pages, or pages that are not linked together.
Your website is new and has many/no backlinks. Because Googlebot relies on links to discover pages, it usually also uses links from other domains to access your site. If other sites haven't started linking to you yet, it will take longer to index.
Your website contains a lot of multimedia content, such as videos, images, or appears in Google News. In some cases, Google may use sitemaps for additional context.
According to Google, a small website is defined as roughly 500 pages. If your site is smaller (or even larger), you can use a few steps to make a rough estimate of the number of indexed pages.
First, you can search for "site:" in your domain. This will give you a rough idea of how much of your site is already indexed by Google. The "site:" operator allows you to get search results for your website only, and Google tells you approximately how many pages will appear in the results. Remember that although Google tells you it's about “how many results you have, it's not completely reliable.
In fact, it is possible that you have multiple non-canonical URLs for the same indexed pages, making it appear that you have more pages indexed than you actually do. If the "site:" search operator returns fewer results than you expect, it probably means that not all of your pages are indexed.
In this case, adding the steps to add a sitemap to Google Search Console certainly couldn't hurt.
If you already have Search Console set up, you can also audit your indexing in the coverage report in the Index section. From there you can check the "Valid" pages to see if they match what you expect, you can even see a list of valid pages to check the status of the pages.
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