Sitemap

Workflow

1. Fetch /sitemap.xml (or sitemap index)
2. Run scripts/parse-sitemap.ts → validate structure
3. Cross-check URL coverage vs crawled pages
4. Detect orphan URLs (in sitemap but not linked)
5. Detect missing URLs (linked but not in sitemap)

Best Practices

• Max 50,000 URLs or 50 MB per sitemap (use index if larger)
• <lastmod> actual file modification date (not generation date)
• <priority> and <changefreq> largely ignored by Google
• HTTPS only, absolute URLs
• Reference in robots.txt: Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Special Sitemaps