Sitemap Glossary

An XML element hinting how often a page changes (always/hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly/never). Google ignores it. Most modern guidance is "don't bother."

Google Search Console enforces a 500 sitemaps-per-property limit and a 50,000 URLs (or 50 MB uncompressed) per-sitemap limit. Both are hard caps.

A sitemap extension declaring language and regional variants of a URL. Used instead of (or alongside) HTML `<link rel="alternate" hreflang>` tags.

A sitemap extension declaring images on a page, helping Google Images discover and index them. Supports up to 1,000 images per URL entry.

An open push-notification protocol for search engines, jointly run by Microsoft (Bing) and Yandex. Notifies participating engines about new or changed URLs without waiting for a crawl.

An optional XML element giving the date and time a URL was last modified. Google treats it as a trust signal — accurate lastmod values increase the chance of fast recrawls.

A specialised sitemap for content published in the last 2 days, used by Google News to surface fresh articles in News results, Top Stories, and Discover.

An XML element rating a URL's importance relative to others on the same site, on a 0.0–1.0 scale. Google ignores it. Default is 0.5.

The practice of serving your XML sitemap from a CDN (and often from your own domain via CNAME) rather than from your origin server. Reduces origin load, improves cache hits, and avoids origin downtime affecting indexing.

A line in robots.txt declaring the location of your sitemap. Supported by all major search engines, the recommended way to advertise a sitemap to crawlers you don't directly notify.

Plain-English definitions for XML sitemap terminology — sitemap index, lastmod, IndexNow, hreflang, and every other term you'll meet in a Google Search Console error.

An XML file that lists multiple sitemap files instead of URLs, used when a site has more than 50,000 URLs or a single sitemap file exceeds 50 MB uncompressed.

The legacy practice of notifying search engines about a sitemap update by GETting a URL like `google.com/ping?sitemap=...`. Google deprecated it in June 2023.

SitemapHost-specific term — the per-domain URL cap a customer allocates from their plan's total URL pool. Lets multi-domain accounts split URLs flexibly between domains.

A sitemap extension declaring videos on a page, helping Google Video and Google Search surface video results. Supports up to 1,000 videos per URL.

The 2005 specification at sitemaps.org defining the XML format for sitemaps. Jointly authored by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft and unchanged in its core form since 2008.