Glossary · technical-seo
What is Sitemap?
A sitemap is an XML file listing the URLs on your site that you want search engines to know about, usually sitting at /sitemap.xml. It is a suggestion rather than an instruction — Google is free to ignore it — but it is how a bot finds pages that are not well linked from your menu, and it carries a last-modified date per URL so the crawler knows what changed. Large sites split it into several files joined by a sitemap index. Point to it from robots.txt, submit it once in Search Console, and after that it should update itself whenever you publish.
What does Sitemap mean for a business in Pakistan?
Most WordPress sites in Pakistan already have one generated by Yoast or Rank Math, and nobody has ever opened it. It is worth looking. The common local problem is a sitemap listing 800 URLs including tag archives, author pages and image attachment pages, which tells Google your site is mostly duplicate filler. A sitemap should list only the pages you would show a customer.
A worked example
A furniture showroom's sitemap holds 612 URLs: 40 real product and service pages, 90 tag archives, 60 author pages and 422 image attachment pages. Cutting it back to those 40 means every URL Google fetches is one you actually want ranking, instead of roughly 93% of the file being waste.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- CrawlingcrawlingCrawling is a search engine's bot fetching your pages by following links — the same way a person clicks around a site, but automated and far faster.…
- IndexingindexingIndexing is Google storing a copy of your page so it can be shown in results. It is the step after crawling: a bot visits the page, then Google…
- SEOSEOSEO is the work of making a website turn up in Google's unpaid results when someone searches for what you sell. It has three parts: technical work so…
- Schema markupschema markupSchema markup is structured data added to a page in a fixed vocabulary, so machines can read facts instead of guessing at sentences. Usually written…
Sitemap — quick answers
What does Sitemap mean?
A sitemap is an XML file listing the URLs on your site that you want search engines to know about, usually sitting at /sitemap.xml. It is a suggestion rather than an instruction — Google is free to ignore it — but it is how a bot finds pages that are not well linked from your menu, and it carries a last-modified date per URL so the crawler knows what changed.
Sitemap ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
سائٹ میپ — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "sitemap". Most WordPress sites in Pakistan already have one generated by Yoast or Rank Math, and nobody has ever opened it.
Why does Sitemap matter for a business in Pakistan?
Most WordPress sites in Pakistan already have one generated by Yoast or Rank Math, and nobody has ever opened it. It is worth looking. The common local problem is a sitemap listing 800 URLs including tag archives, author pages and image attachment pages, which tells Google your site is mostly duplicate filler. A sitemap should list only the pages you would show a customer.
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