there are currently no xml sitemap contexts available

There are currently no xml sitemap contexts available update#

So, to recap, a crawler can prioritize crawling of freshly updated pages, and not spend resources on recrawling unchanged pages (e.g. “Sitemaps may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index.” – Google Blog One of the problems I see often is that sites use the Date/time of when the sitemap was generated as the last-modification date for all of the Pages in the sitemap file – that isn’t useful.” John Mueller explained in this Reddit thread. “When we can tell that it’s used properly, it’s a useful signal. Google only uses the lastmod attribute when used properly.

There are currently no xml sitemap contexts available update#

You may think: “Okay, so I will make a script to update all the lastmod attributes in my sitemap to a new date every day and my site will always be super fresh in Google.” Don’t do that, it won’t help. As a result, search engines have a fresher index of websites. Your page will get crawled sooner, and the search engines will save resources that would otherwise be spent on recrawling and comparing your pages. I don’t have to waste my time crawling and indexing this unchanged page and will rather spend my time crawling pages that have changed since my last visit. The sitemap tells me the page has been last updated on February 14, 2019. How? It can contain important additional information for each URL.Ĭrawler: The last time I crawled this page was March 1, 2019.

There’s more to the sitemap than being indexed by the search engines.įor example, a sitemap can speed up the whole process of crawling. If you’ve just started a blog and your domain is still nowhere to be found in the SERP, the easiest way to catch crawlers’ attention is to submit your website and your XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools. If you know your website has poor internal linking, and some of the pages might be “orphans” without any internal or external links, it’s great to have a sitemap to inform the search engines about their existence.

To make crawling more efficient (which is especially important for big websites), you should include the last updated metadata in the sitemap. online shop), it’s great to let the search engines know about all your URLs available for crawling. If you have a website with thousands of pages (e.g. Which websites should definitely use a sitemap? Huge websites Google claims that “in most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap, and you’ll never be penalized for having one.”īut is implementing a sitemap worth the extra work?Ī blog with hundreds of well-structured pages with a good internal linking probably won’t see any difference in the number of indexed pages, because all of them were probably indexed even before having a sitemap.

The great thing is, you can only benefit from having a sitemap. Media Sitemap – you can create a separate sitemap for your images and videos or you can include them in your normal URL sitemap. You will also need multiple sitemaps if you are over the sitemap size or number of URLs limit. For example, you might have different sitemaps for posts and pages (common with WordPress websites) or multiple sitemaps if one of them exceeds the size limit. It lists all your sitemaps if you have more than one. It lists URLs of the pages on your website. URL Sitemap – this is what most people refer to with/as “XML sitemap”.