A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website, helping search engines like Google discover and index your content. XML sitemaps improve SEO by ensuring search engines can find all your pages, while HTML sitemaps help visitors navigate your site easily.

XML is the most important format for SEO as it's the standard format recognized by Google, Bing, and other search engines. HTML sitemaps are great for user experience. Use XML for search engines and HTML for visitors. TXT format is simple but lacks metadata.

Update your sitemap whenever you add new pages, remove pages, or make significant changes to your website structure. For dynamic websites, consider regenerating sitemaps weekly or monthly. Our tool makes it easy to regenerate sitemaps quickly.

Upload your XML sitemap to your website's root directory (e.g., yoursite.com/sitemap.xml), then submit it through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You can also add the sitemap URL to your robots.txt file.

A single XML sitemap can contain up to 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50MB. For larger websites, you'll need to create multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file. Our tool currently generates sitemaps for up to 100 pages per crawl.

No, our sitemap generator only crawls publicly accessible pages. It cannot access password-protected areas, login-required pages, or pages blocked by robots.txt. Only include publicly accessible URLs in your sitemap.

Priority (0.0-1.0) indicates the relative importance of pages on your site, with 1.0 being most important. Changefreq tells search engines how often a page is likely to change (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). These are hints to search engines, not commands.

Yes, you should exclude pages like admin areas, duplicate content, temporary pages, and pages with noindex tags. Our crawler automatically excludes common file types (images, CSS, JS) and pages with URL parameters. You can manually edit the generated sitemap to remove unwanted URLs.

Yes, our sitemap generator is completely free to use. You can generate sitemaps in multiple formats (XML, HTML, TXT, JSON, ROR) and download them instantly. There are no hidden fees, registration requirements, or usage limits for basic sitemap generation.

For large websites with thousands of pages, consider using sitemap index files that reference multiple smaller sitemaps. You may also want to use specialized SEO tools or CMS plugins that can handle large-scale sitemap generation. Our tool is ideal for small to medium-sized websites.