Technical SEO

Sitemap

Quick Definition

A sitemap is a file that lists URLs on a site so search engines can discover and prioritise crawling. The most common format is XML; HTML sitemaps exist for human navigation.

In context

XML sitemaps are submitted via Search Console (and Bing Webmaster Tools) and split into sub-sitemaps when a site exceeds 50,000 URLs or 50 MB. Sitemaps don't guarantee indexation — they're a discovery aid, not a ranking signal. Best practice: include only canonical, indexable URLs (no noindex pages, no redirects, no 4xx); update lastmod honestly when content changes; and use sitemap-index files when you have multiple sub-sitemaps. See also xml-sitemap and html-sitemap.

Example

torontoseo.com publishes a sitemap-index referencing 37 sub-sitemaps (cities, industries, articles, glossary, etc.) totalling ~5,500 URLs.

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Related terms

Schema Markup

Schema markup is structured data added to pages (in JSON-LD format) that helps search engines understand content type — product, recipe, FAQ, local business, article.

Dofollow

Dofollow describes any link without a nofollow attribute — the default behaviour, which passes ranking authority from the linking page to the linked page.

FCP (First Contentful Paint)

FCP measures when the first piece of DOM content appears on screen. Good FCP is under 1.8 seconds.

FID (First Input Delay)

FID measured the delay between a user's first interaction and the browser's response. It was replaced by INP as a Core Web Vital in March 2024.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file listing your site's URLs in a structured format that helps search engines discover and prioritize them.

HTTP Status Code

HTTP status codes are 3-digit responses servers send with each request: 200 (success), 301 (permanent redirect), 302 (temporary), 404 (not found), 500 (server error).

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