Quick Answer
Where do I put my sitemap? Upload sitemap.xml to your site's root directory, add its location to robots.txt, and submit it in Google Search Console.
Frequently Asked Questions
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all URLs on your site, helping search engines discover and crawl your pages. It is especially useful for new sites, large sites, sites with poor internal linking, or pages not easily reached through navigation.
Upload sitemap.xml to your site's root directory (e.g., yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). Add the sitemap location to your robots.txt file and submit it in Google Search Console under Sitemaps section.
Priority ranges 0.0 to 1.0 (relative importance within your site). Use 1.0 for homepage, 0.8 for main category pages, 0.6 for standard pages. Changefreq indicates update frequency: daily for blogs, monthly for static pages. Search engines may ignore these hints.
Each sitemap can have up to 50,000 URLs and must not exceed 50MB uncompressed. For larger sites, use a sitemap index file that references multiple smaller sitemaps.
Include only pages you want indexed. Exclude thin content, duplicate pages, admin areas, search result pages, and pages blocked by robots.txt. Every URL in your sitemap should be valuable and return a 200 status code.
Update whenever you add, remove, or significantly change pages. For dynamic sites with frequent changes, regenerate daily. For mostly static sites, update when content changes. The lastmod date should reflect actual content changes.