To use it, install and activate the plugin. Then, head to Settings → Simple Sitemap. You can either click on one of the demos to get a pre-made shortcode or create your own shortcode using the various shortcode attributes: How to create a HTML sitemap.Cloudflare isn’t caching it, it’s easy to check in the headers. cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC means it’s not cached. Cloudflare does not consider the asset eligible to cache and your Cloudflare settings do not explicitly instruct Cloudflare to cache the asset. Instead, the asset was requested from the origin web server.In order to remove a sitemap in the new Search Console, you go to the sitemaps menu, then you click on the sitemaps file there, and now click on the dot dot dot menu in the top left and select Remove sitemap. By doing this, Google will stop tracking the sitemap file in Search Console. Alternatively, you could just remove the sitemap file from ...The ‘Sitemaps’ menu is under the ‘Index’ section. If you do not see ‘Sitemaps’, click on ‘Index’ to expand the section. Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps (if any) like sitemap.xml. Enter ‘sitemap_index.xml’ in the ‘Add a new sitemap’ field to complete the sitemap URL.1. Log in to your WordPress website in one browser tab, and have your XML sitemap open in another tab. 2. Customize the Yoast settings relating to content types. In the left-hand menu of your WordPress website, hover over the Yoast SEO plugin, then click on Search Appearance. Click through the tabs at the top to get an idea of how Yoast ...Generate a one time sitemap from a list of urls. If you are just looking to take a giant list of URLs and turn it into some sitemaps, try out our CLI. The cli can also parse, update and validate existing sitemaps. npx sitemap < listofurls.txt # `npx sitemap -h` for more examples and a list of options. const { SitemapStream, streamToPromise ...I am using the following npm package sitemap.It works as expected with the basic sitemap.xml. However, the documentation for Sitemap Index seems incomplete.May 23, 2023 · Learn about sitemaps. A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides ... Apr 29, 2022 · On clicking “Checkup”, the tool will start searching for a sitemap on the entered website. Once it finds the sitemap, it’ll show the search results with the list of sitemaps as you can see below. Image via SEO Site Checkup. 6. Use Bing Webmaster Tools. You don’t have to stop at Google when you want to find a sitemap. Es wird so etwas wie das hier dort stehen: Wenn die Zahl 499 oder kleiner ist, gehe zu Sitemaps > XML sitemap. Da Google keine große Beachtung schenkt bezüglich <lastmod>, <changefreq>, und <priority>, empfehlen wir diese aus der Sitemap-Datei auszuschließen. Klicke “Next” und speichere die Sitemap auf deinem Computer.3. Code all your URLs in XML tags to look like the type of sitemap you want to create. This page explains how to use XML tags in further detail. 4. If you have multiple sitemap files, create a sitemap index file and include the links to the individual sitemaps you created. This one is already described in the section titled "Sitemap Index".3. Code all your URLs in XML tags to look like the type of sitemap you want to create. This page explains how to use XML tags in further detail. 4. If you have multiple sitemap files, create a sitemap index file and include the links to the individual sitemaps you created. This one is already described in the section titled "Sitemap Index".Tour Start here for a quick overview of the site Help Center Detailed answers to any questions you might have1 The Page is Set as Noindex. The first reason why your URL might not be appearing in the sitemap is that you’ve set that particular page or post as Noindex. You can check this by clicking on the Advanced tab settings of that particular post or page. If you see that the Robots Meta tag is set to Noindex, then that’s why your URL is not ... As you can see, the Yoast.com XML sitemap shows several ‘index’ sitemaps: post-sitemap.xml, page-sitemap.xml, video-sitemap.xml etc. This categorization makes a site’s structure as straightforward as possible. So if you click on one of the index sitemaps, you’ll see all URLs in that particular sitemap.I've read the Google docs on sitemap formats but there's one thing they don't make clear: will search engines automatically look for and find /sitemap_index.xml or do you have to tell them about it via /robots.txt or the main /sitemap.xml? Can you not have a /sitemap.xml and still rely on /sitemap_index.xml to be found and harvested?2. No content for the sitemap. Second, check that items exist in order to create the individual sitemap. For example, a category sitemap requires categories with published content. If the items do not exist, exclude the post type or taxonomy from the sitemap until you create content. For more information, see this how-to guide. 3. Rewrite rules ...i am currently using Yoast SEO wordpress plugin, and the sitemap was saved as sitemap_index.xml but would like it to be sitemap.xml, how do i change this? also anyone have any suggestions with SEO work as im new to it all! KRThe /sitemap_index.xml version (created by Yoast) seems to be fine and looks like it includes all posts and pages. @alflood The sitemap located at sitemap XML appears to be generated by Free Online Sitemap Generator, which you can see stated in the following comment:If the status code is 200 for the sitemaps, then make sure to redirect all the XML sitemap variations to the final variation of the XML Sitemap. And once you’ve done this, clear your website cache and try to submit your sitemap in the Google Search Console again. sitemap_url (url) -- The URL of a sitemap, either a regular sitemap, a sitemap index, or a link to a robots.txt file. In the case of a sitemap index or robots.txt, the function will go through all the sub sitemaps and retrieve all the included URLs in one DataFrame. max_workers (int) -- The maximum number of workers to use for threading. The ... Create sitemap and index files from one large list. If you know you are definitely going to have more than 50,000 urls in your sitemap, you can use this slightly more complex interface to create a new sitemap every 45,000 entries and add that file to a sitemap index.Above is the minimal configuration required to have it work. By default, the generated sitemap will include all of your site’s pages, except the ones you exclude. It will generate a sitemap-index.xml file at the root of your site and for every 45000 URLs a new sitemap-X.xml file. The sitemap-index.xml file will point at the generated .xml files.You can customize the sitemap index in the “Content types”, “Categories & tags”, and “Advanced” settings of Yoast SEO. You’ll find these settings under Yoast SEO > Settings. You can customize posts, pages, and other custom post types under the “Content types” tab. Removing a post type from the search results will also remove ...If the status code is 200 for the sitemaps, then make sure to redirect all the XML sitemap variations to the final variation of the XML Sitemap. And once you’ve done this, clear your website cache and try to submit your sitemap in the Google Search Console again. Generate a one time sitemap from a list of urls. If you are just looking to take a giant list of URLs and turn it into some sitemaps, try out our CLI. The cli can also parse, update and validate existing sitemaps. npx sitemap < listofurls.txt # `npx sitemap -h` for more examples and a list of options. const { SitemapStream, streamToPromise ... It looks like your robots.txt file references 2 sitemaps, 1 on /sitemap.xml and one on /news-sitemap.xml. The latter one shows a 404 as it does not exist, and the first one gets redirected by our plugin to the Yoast sitemap under /sitemap_index.xml. Having said this, please check if you can edit your robots.txt file under SEO > Tools > File Editor.To add an external sitemap follow the instructions here. Work with dynamic URLs. Please refer to this GitHub comment for how you may best integrate dynamic URLs. Change post URLs for the sitemap. You can use this filter to change post URLs for the sitemap: wpseo_xml_sitemap_post_url Related articles May 23, 2023 · The XML format of a sitemap index file is very similar to the XML format of a sitemap file, and it's defined by the Sitemap Protocol . This means that all the sitemap requirements... Jan 30, 2022 · /public/sitemaps: sitemap-index.xml.gz sitemap-0.xml.gz sitemap-1.xml.gz sitemap-2.xml.gz ... And I need to give google access to all of them, so how can I make it ... May 23, 2023 · The XML format of a sitemap index file is very similar to the XML format of a sitemap file, and it's defined by the Sitemap Protocol . This means that all the sitemap requirements... Blogger Redirection. Blogger blogs now automatically redirect to country-specific blogspot domains but you should enter the main .com address for sitemap generation. The embed tool only works for blogs hosted on Blogger.com. It can also generate XML sitemaps for blogs that uses custom domains with blogspot. Here are some popular blogs hosted on ...The ‘Sitemaps’ menu is under the ‘Index’ section. If you do not see ‘Sitemaps’, click on ‘Index’ to expand the section. Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps (if any) like sitemap.xml. Enter ‘sitemap_index.xml’ in the ‘Add a new sitemap’ field to complete the sitemap URL.Step #3: Add Sitemap Location To Robots.txt File. Now, open up robots.txt at the root of your site. Again, you need access to your web server to do so. So, ask a web developer or your hosting company for directions if you don't know how to locate and edit your website's robots.txt file.Nov 17, 2019 · Es wird so etwas wie das hier dort stehen: Wenn die Zahl 499 oder kleiner ist, gehe zu Sitemaps > XML sitemap. Da Google keine große Beachtung schenkt bezüglich <lastmod>, <changefreq>, und <priority>, empfehlen wir diese aus der Sitemap-Datei auszuschließen. Klicke “Next” und speichere die Sitemap auf deinem Computer. Apr 16, 2015 · 1 Answer. I tried this from htpcbeginner and it worked perfectly. place the following lines inside location block in yoursite.com file in /etc/nginx/sites-avaliable and don't forget to relink it to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled folder. #This rewrite redirects sitemap.xml to sitemap_index.xml, which is what Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin generates. The possible fixes are explained in the following sections. 1. Sitemap Not Working At All. If you see the Sitemap is not opening or showing white page then try out the followings: Disable XML Sitemap in Yoast plugin. Navigate to “Settings > Permalinks” and save your changes. Enable XML Sitemap in Yoast plugin again.Jun 21, 2023 · Keep the XML Sitemap up to date with your website's content. Make sure it's clean: only indexable pages should be included. Reference the XML Sitemap from your robots.txt file. Don't list more than 50.000 URLs in a single XML Sitemap. Make sure the (uncompressed) file size doesn't exceed 50MB. Don't obsess about the lastmod, priority and ... 3. Code all your URLs in XML tags to look like the type of sitemap you want to create. This page explains how to use XML tags in further detail. 4. If you have multiple sitemap files, create a sitemap index file and include the links to the individual sitemaps you created. This one is already described in the section titled "Sitemap Index".1-click Use in WordPress. Don’t forget to replace /mywebsite/ with your subdirectory name. This code simply tells your web server which pages to display when users access Yoast SEO’s XML sitemaps. You can now try viewing your XML sitemap to see if this resolved your issue. 3.Use Sitemap Index: Use a sitemap index file to list multiple sitemaps for a website if you have more than 50,000 URLs or 50 sitemaps. Test your Sitemap : Test your sitemap using Google's Search Console or other tools like XML Sitemaps to make sure that it's working properly.The ‘Sitemaps’ menu is under the ‘Index’ section. If you do not see ‘Sitemaps’, click on ‘Index’ to expand the section. Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps (if any) like sitemap.xml. Enter ‘sitemap_index.xml’ in the ‘Add a new sitemap’ field to complete the sitemap URL.We create many inbound links to Sitemap Index and properly index our site with the major search engines. We then link to each page on your website, forcing the major search engines to crawl your entire site. Therefore, if you do not have a sitemap, we can help. On the other hand, if you have a sitemap and looking for valuable links, we can help ...Use your XML sitemaps as sleuthing tools to discover and eliminate indexation problems, and only let/ask Google to index the pages you know Google is going to want to index. If you’ve got a big site, use dynamic XML sitemaps — don’t try to manually keep all this in sync between robots.txt, meta robots, and the XML sitemaps.Mar 12, 2021 · <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> This tells search engines that they’re reading an XML file. It also states the version of XML and character encoding used. For sitemaps, the version should be 1.0, and the encoding must be UTF-8. URL set <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> 1. Log in to your WordPress website in one browser tab, and have your XML sitemap open in another tab. 2. Customize the Yoast settings relating to content types. In the left-hand menu of your WordPress website, hover over the Yoast SEO plugin, then click on Search Appearance. Click through the tabs at the top to get an idea of how Yoast ...Apr 16, 2015 · 1 Answer. I tried this from htpcbeginner and it worked perfectly. place the following lines inside location block in yoursite.com file in /etc/nginx/sites-avaliable and don't forget to relink it to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled folder. #This rewrite redirects sitemap.xml to sitemap_index.xml, which is what Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin generates. To generate an XML sitemap in WordPress you’ll need a plugin, like Yoast SEO. Here’s how to add Yoast to your website, if you don’t have it installed already: Inside your WordPress dashboard go to ‘Plugins’ and then ‘Add New.’. Next, search for “Yoast SEO.”.Jun 14, 2021 · 1. Log in to your WordPress website in one browser tab, and have your XML sitemap open in another tab. 2. Customize the Yoast settings relating to content types. In the left-hand menu of your WordPress website, hover over the Yoast SEO plugin, then click on Search Appearance. Click through the tabs at the top to get an idea of how Yoast ... If you don’t see it, however (possibly getting a 404 error), make sure you have enabled your sitemap plugin, configured sitemap settings correctly, and also make sure your sitemap URL is correct. Some plugins use the default sitemap.xml as the filename, while others use sitemap_index.xml.1 The Page is Set as Noindex. The first reason why your URL might not be appearing in the sitemap is that you’ve set that particular page or post as Noindex. You can check this by clicking on the Advanced tab settings of that particular post or page. If you see that the Robots Meta tag is set to Noindex, then that’s why your URL is not ...The example shows a sitemap index file in XML format listing two sitemaps. For more information, consult Google’s Documentation. Adding a sitemap to the robots.txt file. The safest and easiest way to inform search engines about your sitemap is by adding a reference to it in your robots.txt file.Jan 30, 2022 · /public/sitemaps: sitemap-index.xml.gz sitemap-0.xml.gz sitemap-1.xml.gz sitemap-2.xml.gz ... And I need to give google access to all of them, so how can I make it ... You can customize the sitemap index in the “Content types”, “Categories & tags”, and “Advanced” settings of Yoast SEO. You’ll find these settings under Yoast SEO > Settings. You can customize posts, pages, and other custom post types under the “Content types” tab. Removing a post type from the search results will also remove ...To use it, install and activate the plugin. Then, head to Settings → Simple Sitemap. You can either click on one of the demos to get a pre-made shortcode or create your own shortcode using the various shortcode attributes: How to create a HTML sitemap.Apr 29, 2022 · On clicking “Checkup”, the tool will start searching for a sitemap on the entered website. Once it finds the sitemap, it’ll show the search results with the list of sitemaps as you can see below. Image via SEO Site Checkup. 6. Use Bing Webmaster Tools. You don’t have to stop at Google when you want to find a sitemap. Jun 21, 2023 · Keep the XML Sitemap up to date with your website's content. Make sure it's clean: only indexable pages should be included. Reference the XML Sitemap from your robots.txt file. Don't list more than 50.000 URLs in a single XML Sitemap. Make sure the (uncompressed) file size doesn't exceed 50MB. Don't obsess about the lastmod, priority and ... As far as I know from my search results on Internet, yoast plugin itself doesn't have such option/feature for changing generated sitemap url, how can I change this url to a customized one programmatically?There are only two pages to index and two in the sitemap. Index.html and GamePlay.html. The 2nd page had been called videos.html and I thought Google had a problem with that is it was the page marked as Not Indexed. But I change the name from videos.html to GamePlay.html which is just like the name at my other website WordBed.Website.Nov 17, 2022 · As you correctly mentioned, the Yoast-generated XML sitemap is /sitemap_index.xml/, and it has no issues in the Console. 1. Sign in to Google Search Console. 2. In the sidebar, select your website. 3. Click on ‘Sitemaps’ under the ‘Index’ section. 4. Under ‘Submitted sitemaps’, click on the sitemap you want to remove. Jan 22, 2023 · Thanks for reaching out about your XML sitemap. By default, when you turn on the Yoast SEO XML sitemap feature, there should be a 301 redirect from the WordPress core XML sitemap, /wp-sitemap.xml/ and /sitemap.xml/ to /sitemap_index.xml/. If this doesn’t happen, there could be a rule in your .htaccess file disrupting this, or you’ve used a ... In effect, a sitemap helps a search engine understand your website structure. Think of it as a map for your website. It shows what all of the pages are on your website. Using gatsby-plugin-sitemap. To generate an XML sitemap, you will use the gatsby-plugin-sitemap package. Install the package by running the following command: How to configure 1. Manually check common XML sitemap locations 2. Check if the sitemap URL is indicated in robots.txt 3. Use Google Search Operators to find sitemap 4. Check if the XML sitemap has been submitted to Google Search Console 5. Check if the XML sitemap has been submitted to Bing Webmaster Tools 6. Use an Online tool 7.2. No content for the sitemap. Second, check that items exist in order to create the individual sitemap. For example, a category sitemap requires categories with published content. If the items do not exist, exclude the post type or taxonomy from the sitemap until you create content. For more information, see this how-to guide. 3. Rewrite rules ...There are only two pages to index and two in the sitemap. Index.html and GamePlay.html. The 2nd page had been called videos.html and I thought Google had a problem with that is it was the page marked as Not Indexed. But I change the name from videos.html to GamePlay.html which is just like the name at my other website WordBed.Website.You can also reach the Sitemap settings in Rank Math using Rank Math’s WordPress menu. Hover over the menu with your mouse, and then click the Sitemap Settings to reach the settings. As is the case with all the settings, the Sitemap settings in Rank Math have been divided into tabs to organize them better. Jun 21, 2023 · Keep the XML Sitemap up to date with your website's content. Make sure it's clean: only indexable pages should be included. Reference the XML Sitemap from your robots.txt file. Don't list more than 50.000 URLs in a single XML Sitemap. Make sure the (uncompressed) file size doesn't exceed 50MB. Don't obsess about the lastmod, priority and ... If the status code is 200 for the sitemaps, then make sure to redirect all the XML sitemap variations to the final variation of the XML Sitemap. And once you’ve done this, clear your website cache and try to submit your sitemap in the Google Search Console again.Aug 27, 2021 · 1) Manually Check Common XML Sitemap Locations. One of the most common (and simple) ways to locate the XML sitemap of a website is to. manually check a few standard locations. This is dead simple and all you need to do is enter your website URL in the browser and then try with a few different variations. Download, Parse, and Analyze XML Sitemaps. One of the fastest and easiest ways to get insights on a website's content is to simply download its XML sitemap (s). Sitemaps are also important SEO tools as they reveal a lot of information about the website, and help search engines in indexing those pages.Online Generator Free and simple Suitable when you need to quickly create a sitemap for a small web site (up to 500) pages. No registration required and you get sitemaps ready immediately. You can download xml sitemap file or receive it via email and put it on your website after that. 5. Jetpack. Jetpack is a popular plugin from Automattic, the creators of WordPress, and happens to be a good option for a WordPress sitemap plugin. The free version comes with a set of traffic tools that includes sitemap features. It automatically generates a sitemap for your public posts and pages.Confusion about sitemap_index.xml. 5. How to use multiple .sitemap files in ASP.NET. 3. Are wildcards allowed in sitemap.xml file? 2. Sitemap file location. 0.5. Jetpack. Jetpack is a popular plugin from Automattic, the creators of WordPress, and happens to be a good option for a WordPress sitemap plugin. The free version comes with a set of traffic tools that includes sitemap features. It automatically generates a sitemap for your public posts and pages.The Blogger Sitemap tool will generate a complete XML sitemap of your Blogger blog with all your blog posts and not just the recently published blog posts. Why are XML Sitemaps required? XML Sitemaps help search engines discover your blog posts and better index your blog. Sitemaps are supported by all major search engines including Google and Bing. Jan 30, 2022 · /public/sitemaps: sitemap-index.xml.gz sitemap-0.xml.gz sitemap-1.xml.gz sitemap-2.xml.gz ... And I need to give google access to all of them, so how can I make it ... The easiest way to create an XML sitemap in WordPress is by using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin for WordPress. It is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market, offering you a comprehensive set of tools to optimize your blog posts for SEO. First, you need to install and activate the All in One SEO plugin.Click on the three stacked dots in the top right corner to find this option. Under “Add a new sitemap” you can add your sitemap URL and click submit. NOTE: You only need to submit the end of the URL, not the domain portion. As long as that sitemap file is saved on the domain that matches your Search Console property.Apr 2, 2022 · Hello @mf01, Thanks for reaching out regarding your sitemap. Indeed, Yoast-generated XML sitemap uses /sitemap_index.xml/ while the third-party sitemap plugins may use /sitemap.xml/. We strongly recommend disabling the 3rd party Sitemap and using Yoast’s. When you do that you will need to delete the 3rd party sitemaps and then add Yoast’s ... The example shows a sitemap index file in XML format listing two sitemaps. For more information, consult Google’s Documentation. Adding a sitemap to the robots.txt file. The safest and easiest way to inform search engines about your sitemap is by adding a reference to it in your robots.txt file.Feb 18, 2020 · Puoi scegliere un nome qualsiasi per la sitemap, ma è una buona prassi utilizzare semplicemente sitemap.xml. Se hai diverse sitemaps, puoi utilizzare uno schema di nomenclatura quale sitemap_1.xml, sitemap_2.xml. It looks like your robots.txt file references 2 sitemaps, 1 on /sitemap.xml and one on /news-sitemap.xml. The latter one shows a 404 as it does not exist, and the first one gets redirected by our plugin to the Yoast sitemap under /sitemap_index.xml. Having said this, please check if you can edit your robots.txt file under SEO > Tools > File Editor.Hello @mf01, Thanks for reaching out regarding your sitemap. Indeed, Yoast-generated XML sitemap uses /sitemap_index.xml/ while the third-party sitemap plugins may use /sitemap.xml/. We strongly recommend disabling the 3rd party Sitemap and using Yoast’s. When you do that you will need to delete the 3rd party sitemaps and then add Yoast’s ...
Feb 7, 2021 · Can you please first confirm whether the URL you submitted for your sitemap is ‘sitemap.xml’ or ‘sitemap_index.xml’? Also, we checked on the page-sitemap.xml file and see that it is being redirected ( see image here ) to the home page. . Paper blinds lowe
i am currently using Yoast SEO wordpress plugin, and the sitemap was saved as sitemap_index.xml but would like it to be sitemap.xml, how do i change this? also anyone have any suggestions with SEO work as im new to it all! KRThe Sitemap XML protocol is also extended to provide a way of listing multiple Sitemaps in a 'Sitemap index' file. The maximum Sitemap size of 50 MiB or 50,000 URLs means this is necessary for large sites. An example of Sitemap index referencing one separate sitemap follows.XML is the markup language (Extensible Markup Language) and gz (short for GZip) is the compression format in this case. All sitemaps must be in xml format like sitemap.xml or in a compressed xml format like sitemap.xml.gz. Also your sitemap's url should be the very first line in your robots.txt file and it should read: May 6, 2023 · The sole purpose of this component is to render the sitemap page when the sitemap.xml endpoint is hit. The actual content will come from the getServerSideProps function, which will get the URLs for all the posts, call the sitemap rendering function and write the response with the text/xml content-type header. Under total discovered URLs, it says 449,991 which happens to be 49,999 x 9. When I remove the Sitemap and re-add the Sitemap Index, the same 9 Sitemap Children get listed, and none of the others appear anywhere. Considering there are over 100 Sitemap Children, this means more than 90% are being completely ignored. 1 Answer. I tried this from htpcbeginner and it worked perfectly. place the following lines inside location block in yoursite.com file in /etc/nginx/sites-avaliable and don't forget to relink it to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled folder. #This rewrite redirects sitemap.xml to sitemap_index.xml, which is what Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin generates.We create many inbound links to Sitemap Index and properly index our site with the major search engines. We then link to each page on your website, forcing the major search engines to crawl your entire site. Therefore, if you do not have a sitemap, we can help. On the other hand, if you have a sitemap and looking for valuable links, we can help ...Dec 23, 2019 · XML Sitemap Index. XML sitemaps have a couple of limitations: A maximum of 50,000 URLs. An uncompressed file size limit of 50MB. Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip (the file name would become ... Confusion about sitemap_index.xml. 5. How to use multiple .sitemap files in ASP.NET. 3. Are wildcards allowed in sitemap.xml file? 2. Sitemap file location. 0.Sitemap index files specify individual properties of the XML files stored as sitemaps in UTF-8 character set on a server. This includes the location of the file, the time of the last change, and information about the language used. A sitemap index file may contain only certain information in XML format. Neither lists of pages are permitted nor ... The Blogger Sitemap tool will generate a complete XML sitemap of your Blogger blog with all your blog posts and not just the recently published blog posts. Why are XML Sitemaps required? XML Sitemaps help search engines discover your blog posts and better index your blog. Sitemaps are supported by all major search engines including Google and Bing. Mar 27, 2009 · 4 Answers Sorted by: 14 In your robots.txt you can point to a sitemap or a sitemap index file using the same syntax: Sitemap: <location> Search engines will know by looking at the file what kind it is. It is worth noting also that sitemap.xml and sitemap_index.xml are only suggested filenames, you may use any names you wish. .