XML Sitemap Optimization
XML sitemap optimization involves how you structure your sitemaps and what URLs are included.
How you choose to do this impacts how efficiently indexing platforms crawl your website and, thus, your content visibility.
Here are four ways to optimize XML sitemaps:
1. Only Include SEO Relevant Pages In XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is a list of pages you want to be crawled (and subsequently given visibility to by indexing platforms), which isn’t necessarily every page of your website.
A bot arrives at your website with an “allowance” for how many pages it will crawl.
The XML sitemap indicates that you consider the included URLs more important than those that aren’t blocked but not in the sitemap.
You’re using it to tell indexing platforms, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d focus on these URLs in particular.”
To help them crawl your site more intelligently and reap the benefits of faster (re)indexing, do not include:
301 redirect URLs.
404 or 410 URLs.
Non-canonical URLs.
Pages with noindex tags.
Pages blocked by robots.txt.
Paginated pages.
Parameter URLs that aren’t SEO-relevant.
Resource pages accessible by a lead gen form (e.g., white paper PDFs).
Utility pages that are useful to users, but not intended to be landing pages (login page, contact us, privacy policy, account pages, etc.).
I’ve seen recommendations to add 3xx, 4xx, or non-indexable pages to sitemaps in the hope it will speed up deindexing.
But similar to manipulation of the last mod date, such attempts to get these pages processed faster may result in the sitemaps being ignored by search engines as a signal, damaging your ability to have your valuable content efficiently crawled.
But remember, Google is going to use your XML submission only as a hint about what’s important on your site.
Just because it’s not in your XML sitemap doesn’t necessarily mean that Google won’t index those pages.
2. Ensure Your XML Sitemap Is Valid
XML sitemap validators can tell you if the XML code is valid. But this alone is not enough.
There might be another reason why Google or Bing can’t fetch your sitemap, such as robots directives. Third-party tools won’t be able to identify this.
As such, the most efficient way to ensure your sitemap is valid is to submit it directly to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
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When valid in GSC and BWT, you will see the green “Success” status.
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If you get a red message instead, click on the error to find out why, fix it, and resubmit.
But in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can do so much more than simple validation.
3. Leverage Sitemap Reporting For Indexing Analysis
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Say you submit 80,000 pages all in one sitemap index, and 9,000 are excluded by both Google and Bing.
Sitemap reporting will help you to understand overarching why, but provides limited reporting on which URLs are problematic.
So, while it’s valuable information, it’s not easily actionable. You need to discover which types of pages were left out.
What if you use descriptive sitemap names that reflect the sections of your website – one for categories, products, articles, etc.?
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Then, we can drill down to see that 7,000 of the 9,000 non-indexed URLs are category pages – and clearly know where to focus attention.
This can also be done within a sitemap index file.
Now, I know both Google and Schema.org show examples encouraging numbered naming. So, you may have ended up in a /sitemap-products-index.xml file with something like this:
/products-1.xml
/products-2.xml
Which is not the most insightful naming convention. What if we break it down into parent categories? For example:
/products-mens.xml
/products-womens.xml
/products-kids.xml
And if your website is multilingual, be sure to leverage language as an additional separation layer.
Such smart structuring of sitemaps to group by page type allows you to dive into the data more efficiently and isolate indexing issues.
Just remember, for this to effectively work, sitemaps need to be mutually exclusive, with each URL existing in only one sitemap. The exception is the Google News sitemap.
4. Strategize Sitemap Size
As mentioned before, search engines impose a limit of 50,000 URLs per sitemap file.
Some SEO specialists intentionally reduce this number, say to 10,000. This can be helpful to speed up indexing.
However, you can only download 1,000 URLs in GSC. So, if 2,000 URLs in a certain sitemap are not indexed, you can only access half of them. If you are trying to do content cleanup, this will not be enough.
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To gain full visibility on all URLs causing issues, break sitemaps down into groups of 1,000.
The obvious downside is that this has a higher setup time as all URLs need to be submitted in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This may also require high levels of ongoing management.
XML Sitemap Best Practice Checklist
Do invest time to:
✓ Dynamically generate XML sitemaps.
✓ Compress sitemap files.
✓ Use a sitemap index file.
✓ Include the <loc> & <lastmod> tags.
✓ Use image tags in existing sitemaps.
✓ Use video and Google News sitemaps if relevant.
✓ Reference sitemap URLs in robots.txt.
✓ Submit sitemaps to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
✓ Include only SEO-relevant pages in XML sitemaps.
✓ Ensure URLs are included only in a single sitemap.
✓ Ensure the sitemap code is error-free.
✓ Group URLs in descriptively named sitemaps based on page type.
✓ Strategize how to break down large sitemap files.
✓ Use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to analyze indexing rates.
Now, go check your own sitemaps and make sure you’re doing it right.
More Resources:
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