Sitemap how many urls

Google expects the standard sitemap protocol in all formats. If you have a larger file or more URLs, you will have to break your list into multiple sitemaps. You can optionally create a sitemap index file a file that points to a list of sitemaps and submit that single index file to Google. You can find more complex examples and full documentation at sitemaps. You can see examples of sitemaps that specify alternate language pages and sitemaps for news, image, or video files.

Most blog software is able to create a feed for you, but recognize that this feed only provides information on recent URLs. For example:. Google supports extended sitemap syntax for the following media types. Use these extensions to describe video files, images, and other hard-to-parse content on your site to improve indexing.

However, if you are using any sort of script, tool, or log file to generate your URLs anything except typing them in by hand , this is usually already done for you. When creating a sitemap, you're telling search engines about which URLs you prefer to show in search results.

These are the canonical URLs. If you have the same content accessible under different URLs, choose the URL you prefer and include that in the sitemap instead of all URLs that lead to the same content. Once you've decided which URLs to include in the sitemap, pick one of the following ways to create a sitemap, depending on your site architecture and size:.

Try searching for information about how your CMS generates sitemaps, or how to create a sitemap if your CMS doesn't generate a sitemap automatically. For example, in case of Wix, search for "wix sitemap". For sitemaps with less than a few dozen URLs, you may be able to manually create a sitemap. For sitemaps with more than a few dozen URLs, you will need to generate the sitemap. There are various tools that can generate a sitemap.

However, the best way is to have your website software generate it for you. For example, you can extract your site's URLs from your website's database and then export the URLs to either the screen or actual file on your web server. Talk to your developers or server manager about this solution.

If you need inspiration for the code, check out our old collection of third-party sitemap generators. Keep in mind that sitemaps can't be larger than 50 MB. Learn more about managing large sitemaps. XML sitemaps take care of search engine needs. HTML sitemaps were designed to assist human users to find content. The question becomes, if you have a good user experience and well crafted internal links, do you need a HTML sitemap? HTML sitemaps are generally linked in website footers.

Taking link equity from every single page of your website. Ask yourself. Is that the best use of that link equity? Or are you including an HTML sitemap as a nod to legacy website best practices? If few humans use it. Does that HTML sitemap have a reason to exist? I would argue no. The problem is, as soon as you create or remove a page, your sitemap is outdated. Dynamic XML sitemaps, on the other hand, are automatically updated by your server to reflect relevant website changes as they occur.

Dynamic XML sitemaps and a sitemap index are modern best practice. Mobile and HTML sitemaps are not. Use image, video and Google News sitemaps only if improved indexation of these content types drive your KPIs. By including only SEO relevant pages, you help search engines crawl your site more intelligently in order to reap the benefits of better indexation.

Beginner SEO Get started. Establish your business details with Google. Advanced SEO Get started. Documentation updates. Go to Search Console. General guidelines. Content-specific guidelines. Images and video. Best practices for ecommerce in Search. COVID resources and tips.

Quality guidelines. Control crawling and indexing. They are simply not interesting - not relevant to something. Thats why HTML sitemaps are better to omit. This is also the limit for any type of sitemap file, including HTML; any more than that, and the engine will stop crawling any single file. Sitemaps are a good way to hint to the engines which content is important, or has recently changed or been added, and submitting one in the Search Console is a great way to invite Google to re-crawl your site.

This is not a replacement for great website architecture and internal linking schemas. Agree with Stephen that sitemaps aren't nearly as crucial as they used to be, but in my own experience, they can still be helpful if done right. If you're going to have a large sitemap, best to stick with XML, since it's the standard.

Two things you can do here. You can have a single XML sitemap at the root, with only the most important and top level pages, plus newest content. The older content will be found and crawled if the site architecture is sound, or else if it was already indexed and no changes were made to the content, the engine won't even need to re-crawl it; it's already in. For a more complete sitemap, you can break it up into multiple sitemaps. Basically, at the root, you'd create a sitemap index file, pointing to the URL's of all the sitemaps.

You can break the sitemaps up by content type pages, posts, etc. A good resource here is Yoast; if you have a WordPress site, you might be using them already, but if not, look at how they structure their sitemaps and try to mimic that. If possible, it's best to automate sitemap generation and updates; otherwise you'll spend way too much time and labor on this. Sign up to join this community.