Sitemap, it is also a sitemap, is a file containing the structure of your site in a form convenient for a search robot, and sometimes even for a living user.
What is a Sitemap?
The main purpose of this file is to facilitate the task of collecting the addresses of your site pages for a search robot and thereby speed up the process of indexing your resource.
Indexing is the process of entering your site's content into a search engine's database. This is necessary in order to quickly generate search results - a list of links, following which a user who has typed a certain phrase in the search bar will be able to find the information he is looking for. From the SEO point of view, indexing is the most important process, because if a site is not in the search engine's index, it will not be offered by its user, therefore, it is very unlikely that someone will wander into such a resource.
The search engine robot gets to the pages of the site, following the links leading from the main page, then following the links leading from the first level pages … the chain is not endless - it is unlikely that the search robot will get to the pages of the fourth, fifth and subsequent nesting levels. As a rule, the robot successfully copes with its task, however, problems may arise, firstly, with the indexing of dynamically generated pages, and secondly, with determining the importance of the pages.
The sitemap file allows you to solve the problems mentioned above - it provides the robot with a clear site structure, and each element of this structure is provided with a link to the corresponding page. A sitemap can exist as a text file or in xml format, depending on what specific purpose it pursues. Yandex recommends the second format because it allows you to specify additional parameters, such as: the date the page was last modified, the frequency of page changes, as well as its relative importance.
How to create a Sitemap for a site in Yandex?
The Yandex support team recommends finding a program to create a sitemap on the Internet, since there are many sites that provide such services. Typically, these sites have a 500 URL limit for the free version, and to get around it, you either have to pay or write such a script yourself. The path to the sitemap located on the domain is specified by the corresponding directive in the robots.txt file.
The Yandex support team puts forward a number of requirements for the sitemap file:
1. This file must be located on the same domain for which it was created, and, accordingly, describe the structure of only the domain on which it is located.
2. When accessing the file, the server must return the code 200.
3. The site map should contain no more than fifty thousand addresses, if there are more of them, you need to create several files. In addition, the sitemap file cannot exceed 10 MB uncompressed.
4. You must use UTF-8 encoding.
