Hand Google a mapof your whole site.
A crawler can only rank the pages it finds. Paste your URLs, one per line, and get a clean, valid XML sitemap, properly escaped, with optional changefreq and priority, ready to drop at your domain root and submit to Search Console.
Your URLs
One absolute URL per line. Lines that aren't full https:// URLs are skipped and flagged below. changefreq and priority are optional hints; Google treats both lightly.
Your sitemap.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://yoursite.com/</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://yoursite.com/about</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://yoursite.com/pricing</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://yoursite.com/contact</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>Pre-flight checks
Valid and ready to submit
Save this as sitemap.xml at your domain root (yoursite.com/sitemap.xml), submit it in Google Search Console, and add a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt.
Your move
A sitemap gets you found. I make sure what's found is worth ranking.
Your sitemap is valid with 4 URLs, ready to submit to Search Console.
Submitting URLs is the easy half. The hard half is having pages that earn the click and the position once a crawler arrives. Send me your site and in 30 minutes I'll show you which pages are pulling their weight, which are dead weight on your crawl budget, and where the real ranking gains are hiding. Free, yours to keep.
Plain English
A sitemap is a guest list for crawlers.
An XML sitemap is a single file that lists the URLs you want search engines to know about. It doesn't force anything to rank, but it does make sure nothing important gets missed: deep pages, freshly published posts, and anything your internal linking buries. For a new or sprawling site, that discovery gap is the difference between a page being indexed this week or next quarter.
The format is a strict, machine-readable standard from sitemaps.org. Every URL lives inside a <url> block with a required <loc>, plus optional hints like <changefreq> (how often the page changes) and <priority> (how it ranks against your own other pages, on a 0.0 to 1.0 scale). Get the syntax wrong, leave an ampersand unescaped, and Search Console rejects the whole file.
This generator takes the tedium out of it. Paste your URLs, pick a changefreq, set a default priority, and it builds the full, valid file for you, escaping the characters that break XML and flagging anything that looks off before you ship it. Copy it, save it as sitemap.xml at your root, and submit it.
The formula
<url><loc>URL</loc><changefreq>…</changefreq><priority>…</priority></url> — one per page, wrapped in <urlset>
Three URLs with weekly changefreq and 0.8 priority become a single <urlset> document: each page gets its own <url> block, & in any query string is escaped to &, and the file opens with the XML declaration and the sitemaps.org namespace. That exact structure is what Search Console validates against.
The generator flagged your sitemap. Here's why.
A line isn't a full http(s):// URL.
Sitemaps require absolute, fully-qualified URLs. '/about' or 'about.html' won't validate. Use the complete address, https://yoursite.com/about, scheme and domain included.
More than 50,000 URLs.
That's the hard per-file limit. Split your URLs across multiple sitemap files and reference them all from a single sitemap index (sitemap_index.xml). Most CMS plugins do this automatically.
Zero URLs.
An empty sitemap tells crawlers nothing. Paste at least one URL. If you only have a handful of pages, that's fine, a small sitemap still speeds up discovery.
URLs from multiple domains.
A sitemap can only contain URLs from the same host it's submitted under. Cross-domain URLs get ignored. One sitemap per property.
How to get a sitemap actually working for you
01Only list indexable URLs
Leave out noindex pages, redirects, and canonicalized duplicates. A sitemap full of pages you don't want ranked sends crawlers mixed signals.
02Keep it to live, 200-status pages
404s and 301s in a sitemap waste crawl budget and erode trust in the file. List the final, canonical destination URL only.
03Submit it in Search Console
Don't wait to be found. Add the sitemap URL under Sitemaps in Google Search Console (and Bing Webmaster Tools) to trigger discovery directly.
04Reference it in robots.txt
Add a 'Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml' line to your robots.txt so every crawler, not just the ones you manually notify, finds it.
05Don't sweat priority too much
Google has said it largely ignores <priority>. Use it to express relative importance within your own site, but it won't outrank a competitor for you.
06Keep it fresh
Regenerate when you publish or remove pages. A stale sitemap pointing at dead URLs is worse than none. Dynamic CMS sitemaps update themselves; static ones don't.
The vocabulary
- XML sitemap
- A structured file listing the URLs on your site you want search engines to crawl and index.
- loc
- The required tag inside each <url> block holding the page's absolute URL. The only mandatory child.
- changefreq
- An optional hint for how often a page changes: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or never.
- priority
- An optional 0.0 to 1.0 value signalling a URL's importance relative to your other URLs. Default is 0.5.
- Sitemap index
- A master file that lists multiple sitemap files, used when you exceed the 50,000-URL or 50MB single-file limit.
- Crawl budget
- The number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given window. Clean sitemaps spend it wisely.
Sitemap questions, straight answers
An XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs on your site that you want search engines to discover and index. It follows the sitemaps.org standard: each page sits in a <url> block with a required <loc> and optional <changefreq> and <priority> hints. It doesn't make pages rank, but it makes sure they get found.
Keep going
A calculator tells you what. A call tells you what to do about it.
Send me the account behind these numbers. I'll tell you straight where the money's leaking and what I'd fix first — free, and you keep it whether you hire me or not.