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Definition

Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file listing the URLs you want search engines to know about, often with metadata like last-modified dates. It helps crawlers discover pages, especially on large sites or ones with weak internal linking, but does not guarantee indexing.

Related terms

robots.txt

A file telling crawlers which parts of a site they may or may not crawl.

Crawl budget

How many of a site's URLs a search engine will crawl in a given period.

Canonical URL

The version of a page you tell search engines to treat as the original.

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