XML Sitemap
A machine-readable file that lists canonical URLs and optional metadata to help search engines discover and monitor a website’s indexable resources.
Accurate sitemaps improve discovery and monitoring for large, new, frequently changing, or weakly linked sites and provide useful coverage signals in search-engine tools.
A multilingual site generates separate sitemap files containing only canonical, indexable 200-status URLs, adds accurate lastmod dates, groups them in a sitemap index, and declares it in robots.txt.
A sitemap is a discovery hint, not a ranking or indexing guarantee. Including redirected, duplicate, blocked, non-canonical, or stale URLs creates conflicting signals, and lastmod should not be changed without meaningful updates.
The Sitemap protocol expresses URL locations in an XML urlset or references multiple files through a sitemap index. Optional lastmod values should reflect significant content changes; specialised extensions can describe images, video, or news where supported. Sitemaps may be declared in robots.txt and submitted to search engines.
Systems Architecture
http://Sitemaps.org — Protocol — https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html; Google Search Central — Build and submit a sitemap — https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap