In this edition of Ask An SEO, we break down a common point of confusion for site owners and technical SEOs:
Do I need both an XML sitemap and an HTML one, and which one is better to use for SEO?
It can be a bit confusing to know whether it’s better to use an XML sitemap or an HTML one for your site. In some instances, neither is needed, and in some, both are helpful. Let’s dive into what they are, what they do, and when to use them.
What Is An XML sitemap?
An XML sitemap is essentially a list of URLs for pages and files on your website that you want the search bots to be able to find and crawl. You can also use the XML sitemap to detail information about the files, like the length of run-time for the video file specified, or the publication date of an article.
It is primarily used for bots. There is little reason why you would want a human visitor to use an XML sitemap. Well, unless they are debugging an SEO issue!
What Is The XML Sitemap Used For?
The purpose of the XML sitemap is to help search bots understand which pages on your website should be crawled, as well as giving them extra information about those pages.
The XML sitemap can help bots identify pages on the site that would otherwise be difficult to find. This can be orphaned pages, those with low internal links, or even pages that have changed recently that you may want to encourage the bots to recrawl.
Best Practices For XML Sitemaps
Most search bots will understand XML sitemaps that follow the sitemaps.org protocol. This protocol defines the necessary location of the XML sitemap on a site, schema it needs to use to be understood by bots, and how to prove ownership of domains in the instance of cross-domain references.
There is typically a limit on the size an XML sitemap can be, and still be parsed by the search bots. This means when building an XML sitemap, you should ensure it is under 50 MB uncompressed, and no more than 50,000 URLs. If your website is larger, you may need multiple XML sitemaps to cover all of the URLs. In that instance, you can use a sitemap index file to help organize your sitemaps into one location.
As the purpose of the XML sitemap is typically to help bots find your crawlable, indexable pages, it is usually necessary to ensure the file references it contains all lead to URLs with 200 server response codes. In most instances, the URLs should be the canonical version, and not contain any crawl or index restrictions.
Things To Be Aware Of With XML Sitemaps
There may be good reasons to go against “best practice” for XML sitemaps. For example, if you are instigating a lot of redirects, you may wish to include the old URLs in an XML sitemap even though they will return a 301 server response code. Adding a new XML sitemap containing those altered URLs can encourage the bots to recrawl them and pick up the redirects sooner than if they were just left to find them via crawling the site. This is especially the case if you have gone to the trouble of…
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