Sitemap checklist

Why it matters

A sitemap is a list of the pages you want search engines to find. When it is accurate, crawlers spend their time on the right pages. When it is full of redirects, errors and duplicates, search engines learn not to trust it.

These rules keep your sitemap trustworthy, which helps both Google and the IndexNow engines.

Before you start

• Access to your sitemap settings, usually in your CMS or SEO plugin

Step by step

1. 1

   Only pages you want found

   No redirects, errors, copies or noindex pages.

2. 2

   Real "last changed" dates

   Only update the date when the page really changed.

3. 3

   Split big sitemaps

   Up to 50,000 pages per file, joined by a sitemap index.

4. 4

   Link it from robots.txt

   Add one line: Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

5. 5

   Keep pages fast

   Under 3 seconds, with no server errors.

If something goes wrong

My sitemap lists pages that redirect

List the final address instead. The Fix Kit gives you a clean list of addresses that loaded correctly.

Every page has today's date

Your sitemap generator is using the build time. Use each page's real last-changed date, or leave the date out.

The sitemap is too big

Split it into files of up to 50,000 addresses and 50 MB each, joined by a sitemap index file.

What to do next

Once the sitemap is clean, IndexPedia reads it on every run and sends only real changes to IndexNow.