Types of Sitemaps in SEO and How They Impact Search Engine Visibility

Credits: Edrawmind

Imagine that you’ve just opened a charming new store in the city marketplace. You’ve everything perfect inside. You have stunning products, irresistible offers, and premium service. But there’s a problem.

With no signs to guide visitors inside your store, the store layout is confusing. The shoppers feel clueless, some returning empty-handed without making any purchases.

Now, think of your website as that store and search engines as the visitors. If your website doesn’t have clear guidance (aka a sitemap), Google struggles to find its way, leaving your pages undiscovered.

In this article, we will understand the basics of what a sitemap is, how they work in your favor, the types of sitemaps, and the best practices that users often neglect while creating sitemaps.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that acts like a blueprint of your complete website. Liken it to the index page of your book that enlists all the chapters and subtopics inside them, with the exact page numbers where they can be found.

That being said, your sitemap is the website index page, which helps in two primary ways:

1. It helps Google locate it on the vast web and index it through its crawlers (XML sitemap).
2. It helps your visitors access your website through the sitemap architecture (HTML sitemap).

It takes two types of site maps to achieve the above goals, and we will discuss this in detail ahead. They are XML sitemap and HTML sitemap.

Let’s first understand how this simple file is a fundamental tool for ranking your website on Google, which everyone can see on the first page while searching.

Why do you need a sitemap?

Who doesn’t want to see their pages visible on Google’s top search? But behind the scenes, there’s a whole algorithm designed by Google to crawl over millions of websites. 

Managing 193,890,945 websites is no joke! Not to mention the URLs or pages inside each webpage that need indexing, too. And not to be neglected, there are heavy websites like Wikipedia that alone have more than 7 billion pages for indexing! For your URL to appear in search results, it must be discoverable by Google.

This is where Google’s crawlers play as the heroes that crawl each page in your website to index them for further ranking.

Side note: A crawler is a programmed bot that is designed to discover new content on the web everyday and track them to scale the search engine. Its sole purpose is to make valuable content accessible to its users through the search engine. Googlebot is what Google’s crawler is called. 

The crawlers can span your websites in 2 ways: 

1. Following the internal and external links on your pages. But if it had to rely on this single method, there is a high chance that your website pages may fail to register in Google’s registry books.

Because of crawl budget limitations, it can miss websites with complex linking issues like internal linking, redirect and looping linking problems, and more.

Remember, if you fail Google at indexing, all your efforts fail.

In that case, you need the second way. The different types of sitemap files serve as foolproof methods to ensure that all your website content gets perfectly scanned by the crawler.

Here’s why you wouldn’t want to miss creating and submitting a sitemap file:

• Discovery: Sitemap helps your website to become easily discoverable by the search console
• User Experience: It helps the website visitors to navigate the website easily.
• Quick Indexing: When you have a new website, it may take time to index it without a sitemap.

But then, how exactly do these sitemaps work? Let’s get into the details of the types of sitemaps in SEO.

The Two Types of Sitemap

It’s true that well-planned external and internal linking will help the website to be indexed well on Google. But then, with an increasing number of pages, it can become chaotic and hard to manage. This is why sitemaps are recommended for good visibility.

When we talk about sitemaps, we are talking about two types of sitemaps:

1. HTML

An HTML sitemap file is primarily designed for the benefit of users. Consider it a structural attempt that clearly illustrates all pages on your website in one place and sometimes even the connection between them.

While this sitemap is not aimed at Google, remember that for your website to rank on Google, it has to be user-friendly. After all, user experience is crucial for Google to rank your article. HTML sitemaps empower visitors to teleport to different corners of your page with just a single click.

Following are the benefits that you get by creating HTML sitemaps:

• Structures Large Websites: Not only for the visitors but also for the website owners, the HTML sitemap serves as a directory for the entire website. This keeps complex websites organized and easy to approach.
• Easily discoverable: We did say that HTML sitemaps primarily help the visitors, but that doesn’t mean they remain neglected by the bots. Search engines crawl HTML sitemaps.
• Easy Navigation: HTML sitemap gives you website access from one place through its structure approach. With proper linking, you can span over all active links on the website.
• Internal Link Benefits: Now, internal links upgrade your SEO game. The more internal links, the better it is for your website. HTML sitemaps help in organizing these links well.

How to Create an HTML Sitemap

Now, if you are wondering how to create an HTML sitemap, you have 2 options:

1. Use Plugins

If you use CMS platforms such as Wix or WordPress, you can use the plugins, and they will do everything for you. That’s the benefit of using a Content Management System (CMS). Simple Sitemaps is a popular WordPress plugin.

2. Create manually

Not everyone has the time to create HTML sitemaps manually. But if you do and own a website with less than 100 links, you can compile a list of all links in one place and hand it over to your developer, who will create an HTML page with these links in one place. 

But then, you can also use websites like XML-Sitemaps that can generate this for you for free. This works great if your website has less than 500 pages. You just need to copy your website address link in the indicated field and click on the “Start” button.

The sitemap files will be ready in a few minutes, and you can download both XML and HTML files. After downloading them, they have to be uploaded to your website's root folder.

Apple's HTML Sitemap

2. XML: XML file is intended for the search console bot when it crawls over your website to gather the information for indexing purposes. We will discuss this elaborately soon.

Viral Chilly's XML sitemap

To conclude, here are the fundamental differences between the two types of sitemaps:

1. HTML

a.       Primarily intended for website visitors

b.       Written in HTML language and displayed as web pages

2. XML

a.       Intended for the search engine algorithms

b.       Written in XML code

So, it’s XML that is of primary concern when listing your website on Google. An XML code includes various tags such as:

1. <loc>: It defines the page location
   1. Eg: <loc> www.viralchilly.com/case-studies</loc>

2. <changefreq>: They are of 7 types and tell how frequently a particular URL updates. Once mentioned, Google automatically revisits the page per the mentioned frequency. The seven types are – Never, Yearly, Monthly, Weekly, Daily, Hourly, and Always.

3. <priority>: The page priority criteria tell the algorithm about how important the page is. Now, someone may consider all pages important, but if you do that, you confuse Google. Never rank all the articles as the same. Set a priority for each page. You can scale the pages between 0.0 and 1.0.  Do note that this is a suggestion for Google. Multiple SEO factors determine the actual ranking of the pages.
   1. Eg: <priority> 0.8 <priority>

4.  <lastmod>: It defines when the page was last modified
5. Eg: <lastmod>2024-12-12</lastmod>

XML is one type of sitemap, and it doesn’t end here. While the above tags are used in a normal XML file, there are four further types of XML sitemap files that ensure a proper structuring of your website contents:

1. Image sitemap: It helps Google find all the image files on your website. After all, a good website is a treasure house of catchy images. And they deserve a separate file.

• Tags used: <image:image>, <image:loc>, <image:caption>, <image:title> and
  <image: geo_location >
  

2. Video sitemap: Videos are the most engaging form of content, and they can all be listed in one place in the video XML file to help Google locate all the video files.

• Tags used: <video:video>, <video:thumbnail_loc>, <video:title>, <video:description>, and <video:content_loc>
  

3. News sitemap: A news website that updates multiple news pages daily has a special sitemap file dedicated to it.
   

4. Mobile sitemap: Since websites nowadays are generally designed to be mobile-friendly by default, this file is rarely used for websites that are specifically designed for mobile viewing.
   

Best Practices for Creating XML Type of Sitemap

Now that you know everything about sitemaps – their importance and the types of sitemaps, it’s important to know the best practices to create sitemaps most effectively.

If you already own a website and are unsure how well Google indexes it, it’s always recommended to conduct sitemap audits. These audits give you the status of your current website and tell you which pages need a fix and which are already indexed with Google.

Because you don’t want to disappoint the crawler with issues such as:

• Broken Links: Imagine your page links to another one that is broken or has been taken off.
• Duplicate Content: Crawlers can easily suspect duplicate content. It’s important to take care of information repetition to avoid duplicate content. Chances are that the crawler might skip your website with numerous issues like these on your website.
• And more

Here are the best practices to know for reaping the best benefits of an effective sitemap:

1. Create a Sitemap

Sitemaps benefit you in multiple ways. Firstly, you get discovered faster. Secondly, you can also tell Google through sitemaps which pages you consider more important over others.

Are you wondering whether we should upload a sitemap or if it already exists? Type this <yourwebsitename.com>/sitemap.xml, and eureka - you found it! Or, why not try this for ViralChilly’s website?

But instead of seeing a sitemap, you’ll find a sitemap index (we’ll come to that terminology later). Explore the links, and you’ll have a good idea about what you have read so far in this article. But unless you create one, you won’t get a proper practical experience.

Sitemap location also depends on the CMS that you use.

• If you use WordPress, you can use the YOAST SEO plugin to create XML files. CMS platforms leave you hands-off because every time you add a new page, it updates the sitemap automatically, freeing you from the burden of manually updating it.
• You can also benefit from Google XML sitemaps for building and submitting the sitemaps.
• 3rd party sitemap generator tools such as XML-sitemaps.com can also be of great help in creating sitemaps.

But if you don’t have time for this, leave it to our  SEO experts, who will take care of your website’s SEO ranking, including minute factors like blog commenting.

2. Submit Sitemap to GSC

Sitemaps can’t simply exist! Even though you have created the sitemap, it has to be submitted to the search engine. Without this, you will be at a loss despite having an up-to-date XML file.

For Google, you simply have to follow these steps to submit:

1. Sign in to Google Search Console.
2. After adding the properties successfully, you will see a dashboard.
3. Click on the index at the top corner to show a sidebar.
4. Choose “Sitemaps” from here.
5. Enter the sitemap URL here.
6. Submit.

Under the “Submitted sitemaps” section, you should be able to see the website pages that Google has discovered on your website.

But what if you want to discover the pages that haven’t been indexed?

Look for this section, “Why pages aren’t indexed,” and you will see how many pages have been indexed and how many pages are yet “not indexed.”

But why not indexed?

Google elaborates on this and gives you the reason or error that left a particular page unindexed.
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But what should be a point of worry is fixing errors for pages that you wish to rank on Google and that are currently appearing as unindexed.

If you don’t know how to fix them, leave that to ViralChilly!

Please Note: Submitting your sitemap file on Google is a one time activity. Google takes care of visiting your website and crawling the new updates from time to time so that you don’t have to submit it repeatedly.

3. Avoid NoIndex Pages in sitemap

Accidents happen! Some pages tagged as noindex indicate to Google that they don’t want to be discovered. These pages get skipped.

While the tag noindex is intended for SEO purposes, when it’s used accidentally, it can deprive some of your best content pieces of ranking on search engines like Google.

4. Avoid Duplicate Content

Avoid using duplicate content or the same content on different pages. When you do that, you leave the Google crawler in circles, and it chooses to play safe with its limited crawler budget by ignoring further pages.

This also applies to rewritten content or rewriting the same content in different words. Google’s SEO algorithm is smart!

5. Use Multiple Sitemaps

XML files can hold up to 50,000 URLs. If your website has more, break them into multiple XML files (Child Sitemaps)  and group them under a single directory ( Parent Sitemap)

Source -https://www.myntra.com/sitemap-index.xml.gz 

Wrapping up

For your website pages to rank on Google or any other search engine, they need to be discovered first. Search engines like Google have crawlers designed to discover your pages before ranking them on Google. If you have a large website that is not well structured with links, chances are that some pages might get skipped owing to crawler budget limitations. In such cases, building a sitemap is a foolproof method to get indexed by Google and rank your pages. We have discussed the two types of sitemaps and the exact procedures for the XML type of site map that is responsible for ranking your page.