Do Sitemaps Help With Google Index? (How to Submit Sitemap on GSC)

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a structured file that lists the pages found on a website, helping search engines discover and index them more effectively.

There are two primary types:

• XML sitemaps: designed for search engines and include essential metadata about the URL, such as update frequency, last modification date, and priority.
• HTML sitemaps: designed for users to navigate your website, often found in a website’s footer or navigation menu

XML sitemaps are essential as they provide Google with a direct roadmap to your content. These specialized files ensure your pages are crawled, indexed, and served to users in SERPs.

Here is an example of an XML sitemap:

Typically, users can find a website’s sitemap using the following format on the URL bar: “yoursite.com/sitemap.xml” or “yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml.”

On the other hand, web crawlers like Googlebot gain access to your sitemap when you submit the sitemap file via Google Search Console or include the sitemap link on your robots.txt file, as seen below:

Why Are Sitemaps Essential for Your Website?

We’ve glossed over a few benefits of submitting your sitemap to Google. But there’s more to it than just helping Google discover your web pages.

Here are specific reasons why having a sitemap file is beneficial for your website:

Ensure pages are crawlable and indexable by search engines

Googlebot normally discovers new and updated content by crawling a website through internal links or backlinks. However, during the standard crawling process, web crawlers might miss some pages, especially those orphaned or deeply nested within the site structure.

By complementing Googlebot’s crawling activity, sitemaps can help search engines discover pages that are hard to reach via internal links.

In other words, even if orphan pages are missed during the crawl, Google can fetch and parse the content from pages included in the sitemap. This can also increase the chances of pages appearing on search results faster.

Manage crawl budget effectively 

A sitemap helps manage your website’s crawl budget—Google’s allocated limit for crawling your site’s pages. 

Without a sitemap, Googlebot may waste resources crawling low-priority pages and leaving important pages hungry for a visit. 

Sitemaps also contain essential metadata that can help Googlebot determine which pages to prioritize and how frequently to visit:

• Change Frequency or <changefreq> informs search engines how often a page is likely to change. It can be set to hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or never. Higher frequency means more likelihood of crawling.
• Last Modified Date or <lastmod> indicates when the page was last updated. Useful for prioritizing updated content during the crawling process.

Using a sitemap offers a proactive approach that ensures the crawl budget is utilized effectively and efficiently. This reduces any indexing delays caused by irrelevant or unimportant content.

Highlights important or priority content

Google uses various search signals to determine the relative importance of a page, such as content quality, backlinks, and internal links. However, metadata found on sitemaps can also suggest importance.

The metadata Priority or <priority> indicates the relative importance of a page compared to others, with values ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. A higher <priority> score emphasizes which URL deserves Googlebot’s attention more and should be crawled often. 

For instance, high-priority pages like product catalogs and blog posts typically have higher priority scores than less critical pages. 

While Google doesn’t exclusively rely on this tag, it uses it as a hint when allocating crawl resources. This is especially important for larger websites to ensure key pages are indexed and less crucial ones are prioritized.

(Professional tip: By effectively using XML sitemap metadata <priority>, <lastmod>, and <changefreq>, you can maneuver how Googlebot crawls and indexes the pages on your website.)

How to Create a Sitemap for Your Website?

Here are three various ways to make a sitemap for your website, ranging from manual creation to automatically generating one:

Solution 1: Use a sitemap generator tool

Sitemap generators rely on their proprietary crawlers to map out the site structure by following pages via internal links starting from the homepage.

There are countless free sitemap generators online. Generating a sitemap takes about a few seconds to several minutes, depending on the size of your website.

After downloading the sitemap, you can upload it to your website’s domain root folder and submit it to Google Search Console.

For instance, here is IndexCheckr’s sitemap generated using XML-sitemaps.com:

As seen above, the generated sitemap features metadata like <loc>, <lastmod>, and <priority> but doesn’t include information like <changefreq>. Many sitemap generators are designed for general purposes only and provide a basic structure without too many customization options. 

Moreover, since sitemap generators follow links by standard crawling, these tools may overlook orphaned pages or those disconnected from the site structure. 

Solution 2: Use a CMS plugin

If you’re using a content management system like WordPress, Drupal, or Wix, creating a sitemap is quick and easy with the help of a CMS plugin or extension. 

Yoast is arguably the most popular WordPress SEO plugin that automatically generates a sitemap for your site. We even use it for our website:

The beauty of using CMS plugins is that they often generate a sitemap index file composed of multiple sitemaps. As seen above, we use three major sitemaps in IndexCheckr: Posts, Pages, and Categories.

Individual sitemaps within an index focus on a specific facet of a website, which helps organize content and streamline Googlebot’s crawling activity.

Without a sitemap index, all pages will be clumped into a single sitemap file (which can’t exceed the size limit of 50,000 URLs), which makes managing sitemaps more cumbersome. This is especially true for larger websites like news sites and ecommerce stores.

Moreover, plugin-generated sitemaps consider all pages on your CMS dashboard, which means they are less likely to overlook orphaned or pages deeply nested on your website.

In addition, WordPress plugins and CMS automatically include the sitemap URL on your robots.txt, so you don’t have to edit it manually.

Solution #3: Manually create a sitemap

Creating a sitemap manually is a good option for site owners for either one of two reasons:

• They maintain a small website with a few number of pages
• They want complete control over the content included in the sitemap

While many automated tools and plugins are available, manual creation lets you precisely define which links to include on your sitemap and other essential metadata.

Here is a quick run-through on how to make your sitemap from scratch:

Step 1: List all the pages you want included in the XML sitemap and arrange them in order of importance. If you wish to create a sitemap index file, segregate individual sitemaps according to logical groups, such as blog posts, product pages, landing pages, etc. 

Step 2: Write the XML sitemap. For this purpose, you can use any text editor, such as Windows Notepad, Sublime Text, or Notepad++. Start the XML document using the following opening tag:

<urlset xmlns=”https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>.

Step 3: Add the URLs and their respective metadata. Each entry in a sitemap is nested in <URL> and </URL> tags and typically includes the following parts:

• <loc>: this tag defines the exact URL of the page
• <lastmod>: this tag indicates the last time the page was modified. It uses a date formatted as YYYY-MM-DD.
• <changefreq>: this tag hints to search engines how often the page will likely change.
• <priority>: this tag assigns a priority value to the page according to its relative importance, ranging between 0.0 and 1.0, with 1.0 being the highest priority.

Here is an example sitemap entry:

Step 4: Name the XML file according to their logical grouping after completing your sitemap. For instance, products-sitemap.xml or blogpost-sitemap.xml. Then, upload the files into your website’s root directory so they can become accessible online.

Step 5: To create a sitemap index file, open another text editor and write the following opening tag:

<sitemapindex xmlns=”https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>.

Each sitemap file will be nested within the <sitemap> and </sitemap> tags. For the metadata, use the URL of each sitemap for the <loc> tag and ensure the date on the <lastmod> tag coincides with each sitemap.

Here is an example sitemap index file entry:

After you’ve created the sitemap index file for your website, it’s time to upload it to your site’s root directory and submit it to Google Search Console. 

Let’s explore the step-by-step process of how you can do it below:

Step-by-Step Guide to Submitting on Google Search Console

Step 1: Open your Google Search Console

Log into your GSC Account. 

Select the correct domain property on the dropdown in the top-left corner if you own more than one.

Step 2: Check the sitemaps report

Click the Sitemaps option on the sidebar menu. You can find it under the Indexing dropdown.

This should show all of the existing uploaded sitemaps on your website, as seen below:

Step 3: Add your sitemap

To add a new sitemap, paste the link of the sitemap or sitemap index file into the dedicated bar and click submit.

All successfully uploaded sitemaps will be added to the submitted sitemaps section.

Step 4: Review the status of submitted sitemaps

Click the sitemap or sitemap index to see if Google has successfully discovered the pages.

Each sitemap file should read “Success” under the status and should show how many URLs were found under each file:

Clicking the “Open Sitemap” button at the upper right-hand corner will open the sitemap link in a new tab. If these are met, Google will successfully recognize the sitemap.

(Professional tip: When you use CMS plugins like Yoast, every time you update a page, the tool notifies Google about the changes to expedite the indexing process.)

Supercharge Indexing with IndexCheckr 

While sitemaps boost a website’s crawling and indexing efficiency, Google’s indexing algorithm has a reputation for being unpredictable. 

For this reason, site owners must go beyond managing their sitemaps effectively and actively monitor their pages’ indexing status on Google to stay ahead of indexing changes.

IndexCheckr automates tracking the indexing status of pages on Google, ensuring they remain visible on search results:

The tool determines if pages are indexed on Google and sends email alerts to site owners for any changes in indexing status. 

Moreover, it also integrates with reliable indexing tools to streamline getting non-indexed pages indexed by Google.

Combine effective sitemap creation and management with IndexCheckr to supercharge your website’s indexing potential.

Try IndexCheckr now for FREE—no credit card requirement, no strings attached.

Happy indexing!