What is a Sitemap?

In a nutshell, a sitemap is a list of the pages on your website that you want indexed in search engines.

A sitemap is a file, or group of files, where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google prefer to read this file to access your pages more efficiently than “clicking” on links on individual pages.

There are two primary types of sitemaps:

1. XML

2. HTML

XML sitemaps are not “user-facing” and are not viewed in the browser. They are processed by computers. An XML sitemap tells Google’s crawlers which pages and files or pages on your website you think are important, and also provides valuable information about these files - for example, when the page was last updated, and any alternate language versions of the page.

XML sitemaps consist of several parts:

• An XML version declaration: which search engine crawlers use to determine what type of file they are reading.

• The URL set: tells search engines about the protocol.

• The URL: lists the URL of the page.

• Lastmod: a date format describing when the page was last modified.

HTML sitemaps are essentially collections of interlinked webpages that contain links to all the pages on your website that want search engines to crawl and index. They are user-facing and can be viewed in a browser. Ideally, an HTML sitemap will be a useful resource to human users who may click through, but their primary audience are search engine crawlers.

Additional information:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/sitemaps/overview