Glossary
Sitemap
What a sitemap is and how search engines use one.
Updated
Sitemap: A sitemap is a file, usually XML, that lists the pages of a website a search engine should know about, often with the date each one last changed. It helps crawlers find pages that few links point to and notice when a page is updated, which matters most for new sites and sites with many pages. A sitemap is a hint rather than an order: it does not guarantee that a page will be crawled or shown, and a page left out of it can still be found through links.
Where it shows up
It usually lives at an address such as /sitemap.xml, and the site's robots.txt can point to it. You submit it once in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and the engines read it again on their own schedules.
On this site the sitemap is built from the same list of pages as the menus, and each page's date is the day its content last changed, never the day the site was rebuilt.
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