A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website. An XML sitemap, which is specifically meant for search engines, helps them discover new and updated content. Sitemaps also categorize your website’s content into posts, pages, or any other type of content you might have on your page. This categorization helps search engines […]
Tag Archives: Sitemap
Google’s John Mueller spoke a bit more about when you should update the date in the lastmod tag in the XML sitemap file. He said on Twitter if you are “providing something new for search engines that you’d like reflected in search,” then update the date, if not, then don’t. John said, “Are you providing […]
Microsoft Bing posted a newblog post saying “for XML sitemaps, one of the most critical tags you can include in your sitemap is the “lastmod” tag.” And it will become even more critical as Bing is reworking its crawl scheduling stack to rely more on this lastmod field. Yes, by June, the way Bing decides […]
Google has updated the video indexing report within Google Search Console to add impression data and a way to filter the report by your available sitemaps. As a reminder, the video indexing report went fully live in August 2022 after Google started to slowly roll out the video index report within Google Search Console earlier […]
Google’s Gary Illyes said on LinkedIn this morning that you should “include the URLs that you would want to see as canonical in your sitemaps.” This is not necessarily new advice, Google has said this numerous times, but Gary had a reason to repeat this advice for some reason. Gary added, “It’s normal to have […]
We know that each XML sitemap file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs but what is counted as the 50,000 URLs? John Mueller was asked if Google counts both the location URL and the alternative URL in the 50,000 limits. John said on Twitter it is just the location URL. As Google ,“All formats […]
There was another unconfirmed update on May 16th, about 6 months since the last confirmed Google core update. Spammers killed off the Bing anonymous sitemap submission method. Google will likely replace FID with INP in Core Web Vitals. Google Search Console performance reports now show education Q&A. There may be a new form of knowledge […]
Google announced on August 6, 2022 it will no longer support some of the video and image sitemap extension tags. Google said “Upon evaluating the value of the Google sitemap extension tags, we decided to officially deprecate some tags and attributes, and remove them from our documentation.” This will happen after August 6, 2022 and […]
Google’s John Mueller told a webmaster that for his particular example, it might be a good idea to have a separate sitemap XML file for URLs that are “updated often”. John said, “Putting the newer URLs into a single” often updated “sitemap file is probably a good idea here.” That came up Twitter where he […]
John Mueller from Google was asked Twitter whether the sitemap ping tool is still working or not. John said that he “is not aware of any changes there and the URL appears to be responding to requests as usual”. Indeed it is official documentation still has this as an option. The documentation says, “Use the […]