Technical SEO
XML sitemaps: useful, misunderstood, and no substitute for links
A sitemap is a discovery aid, not an indexing instruction. It helps search engines find URLs they might otherwise miss and tells them when a page genuinely changed. It cannot make a thin page rank, and it cannot compensate for a page nothing links to internally.
The rules that decide whether it helps
- Canonical URLs only. A sitemap listing a URL that canonicalises elsewhere sends two contradictory signals.
- Indexable URLs only. No noindex pages, no redirects, no 404s — every entry should return 200.
- Honest lastmod. If it changes on every deploy regardless of content, it is noise and it will be ignored.
- Under 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed per file, split with a sitemap index above that.
- Referenced from robots.txt and submitted in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Generate it, never hand-write it
A hand-maintained sitemap is a file that is correct on the day it is written and drifts every day after. The version of this site that was audited had a hand-written sitemap containing exactly one URL, with a lastmod date that had not changed in months and could not grow, because there was nothing to add.
Generating from the routes that actually exist makes an entire class of problem disappear: no missing pages, no ghosts of deleted ones, no stale timestamps, no drift between the sitemap and the site.
changefreq and priority are dead
Google has been explicit for years that it ignores both. They survive in generators because nobody removed them. Omitting them makes the file smaller and stops it asserting things nobody consumes — and a priority column where every page is 0.8 is a good indication the file was generated by a plugin nobody configured.
Sitemap index files and specialised sitemaps
- Sitemap index
- A sitemap of sitemaps. Use it once you split by content type, and submit the index rather than the children.
- Image sitemap
- Extends entries with image locations. Worth it when images are a discovery channel — product photography, portfolios, galleries.
- Video sitemap
- Required for reliable video discovery, alongside VideoObject markup. Pointless without an actual video file.
- News sitemap
- Only for sites accepted into Google News, with a strict 48-hour window. Not applicable to most sites, and harmful to fake.
Reading the coverage report properly
Search Console tells you how many submitted URLs are indexed, and the gap is the interesting part. "Discovered — currently not indexed" usually means the URL was found but judged not worth the crawl, which is a quality and internal-linking signal rather than a sitemap problem.
The instinct to resubmit the sitemap when pages are not indexed is understandable and almost never the fix. If nothing internally links to a page, resubmitting a file that mentions it does not change the assessment.
Questions people ask about this
- Will submitting a sitemap get my pages indexed faster?
- It can speed discovery of URLs that are otherwise hard to reach. It has no effect on whether a page is judged worth indexing — that is decided by content quality and internal links.
- Should every page be in the sitemap?
- Every page you want indexed, and nothing else. Thank-you pages, internal search results and paginated duplicates should be excluded, ideally by generating the file from a rule rather than a hand-maintained exclusion list.
- How often should lastmod update?
- When the content meaningfully changes. Tying it to the build timestamp makes every page look edited on every deploy, which teaches crawlers to disregard the field entirely.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. The examples in these guides come from those builds and from the audit that rebuilt this site, not from a content brief. More about how I work, or read the case studies.