Why is a Website XML Sitemap Checker Necessary for Better SEO
XML sitemaps are a fundamental aspect of technical SEO that can significantly impact your SEO efforts.Here's a quick guide to XML sitemaps, their necessity, types, and best practices, Website XML Sitemap Checker, guides you through creating, checking, and submitting your Sitemap.xml.
What is an XML Sitemap?
An XML Sitemap is a file that contains a list of specific URLs from your website. The XML means that the file is saved in XML (Extensible Markup Language) format, a sibling of HTML.This file is embedded in your site, but it typically doesn’t display on the website when you access it. However, the crawler will reference it to collect URLs on the website.This XML sitemap can be a guide for the search engine robot (crawler) to access your important pages.Since the search engine spider follows the URLs on the website and collects them, preparing this sitemap might sound like extra work. However, if your website is new or has hundreds or thousands of pages, the crawler might not correctly access all the pages.
How can XML Sitemap Help Your SEO?
The search engine doesits job by developing spiders to crawl every site’s pages every day. Then with the data they gathered, they use their own complex algorithms to rank those pages. Sometimes, the spiders cannot access a certain site at the node location. This would be difficult for search engines, and the spiders also unable to crawl all pages of the site. A sitemap can help you solve this problem and a Website XML Sitemap Checker can help you check the already present site map of your website.
XML Sitemap Quick History
In 2005, Google launched the XML sitemap protocol, allowing website administrators to compile all their pages in one file.This protocol aids in showing a page's relevance within a website. Yahoo and Bing adopted it by 2006, allowing sitemap discovery via robots.txt files.Initially manually created, many CMS platforms and plugins support automatic sitemap generation and updates, simplifying the process. This evolution signifies how essential sitemaps are for efficient website indexing.
Tips about XML Sitemap Checks to Improve your SEO
An XML sitemap is like a roadmap for search engines of the URLs within your website. Regularly checking them is vital to prevent incorrect URLs from being crawled and potentially indexed and important URLs from being missed.
Here are three checks that you should be making:
1. Are any important URLs missing?
The first step is to check that your key URLs are in there. Your XML sitemap may be static, where it’s a snapshot of the website at the time it was created. If so, there is a chance that it will be outdated. A dynamic sitemap is better as it automatically updates, but settings should be checked to ensure key sections/URLs are not excluded.
How to check: Compare URLs on a web crawl with URLs from your XML sitemaps. You can use crawlers that give you the option to include the sitemap within a crawl.
2. Do any URLs need to be removed?
Generally, avoid the following in your XML sitemaps:
- 4xx / 3xx / 5xx URLs
- Canonicalized URLs
- Blocked by robots.txt URLs
- Noindexed URLs
- Paginated URLs
- Orphaned URLs
An XML sitemap should normally only contain indexable URLs that serve a 200 response code and which are linked within the website – including these URL types that will contribute to the crawl budget and potentially cause issues, such as orphaned URLs being indexed.
How to check: As in the first step of checking URLs, the same crawl will also highlight problem URLs from the above list.
3. Has Google indexed all my XML Sitemap URLs?
To get a better idea of which URLs are indexed, submit your sitemap in Search Console. Go to Index > Sitemaps, select your sitemap, and See Index Coverage to view the Coverage report.
Website XML Sitemap Checkeris a helpful and easy-to-use browser extension tool that helps you find and inspect XML Sitemaps for any website you develop, administer, or navigate in a browser.
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