XML sitemap
Definition
An XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs a site wants search engines to find, often with the date each page last changed. It helps discovery, but it does not guarantee that a page will be crawled, indexed or ranked.
Put in only the addresses you want to appear in search: live pages that return a normal response, are not blocked, are not marked noindex and are the canonical version. Redirects, parameter duplicates and error pages in a sitemap send mixed signals and clutter the reports. Submit the file in Google Search Console and compare the number of submitted pages with the number indexed, because a wide gap tells you where to look.
Google uses the last-modified date only if it is consistently accurate, so change it when a page's content really changes, not when the template does. Google ignores the priority and change-frequency fields, so there is little point tuning them. Very large sites split their addresses across several files listed in a sitemap index, because a single file has a size cap.
A small site with good internal links can be found without one, and publishing one costs little. On a bilingual site, a sitemap can also carry the hreflang annotations that pair each Arabic page with its English twin, which keeps the pairing in one place.
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