Sitemaps are files you submit to search engines to provide information about your site. Search engines use this file to better understand and index your site's pages and structure to show more accurate search results.
Once your site is live, search engines will generally find and index it independently, so sitemaps are not essential, but they can help speed up that process. There are two times in particular when you may want to create a sitemap and submit it to search engines:
- When your site goes live
- When you make significant changes to the structure of your site
Create and Submit a Sitemap
You can create and submit a site map for each one of your sites. Here's how to do it:
- Go to More > Site Management > your site > Overview.
- Under Sitemap > Create sitemap, select Create.
- After selecting this button, we generate a sitemap for your site as an XML file, which you will see in the Manually submit to search engines field.
- Select Copy to copy and submit the file to search engines.
Different search engines will have varying methods for submitting your sitemap. In Google, for example, you can submit a sitemap using the Sitemaps report in Google Search Console. Your site will also include a robot.txt file, which tells search engines which parts of your site to crawl and index. We will include a link to your sitemap in your site's robot.txt file, which Google will find next time it crawls your site even if you don't submit the sitemap.
If you make significant changes to your site, you can recreate and submit a new sitemap. Follow the process as above, and under Sitemap > Recreate sitemap, select Recreate. We'll regenerate a sitemap for your site and update the XML file, and you will need to Copy and manually submit it again.