Web Sitemap Guide

Web

Basic

A standard sitemap.xml looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>https://www.example.com/</loc> <lastmod>2025-05-26</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> <priority>1.0</priority> </url> <url> <loc>https://www.example.com/about</loc> <lastmod>2025-05-20</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset> These must be very standard. Any non-standard tags are not just ignored on platforms like Google, but refuse to work entirely.

Values

loc

REQUIRED: The location URI of a document.

lastmod

OPTIONAL: The date the document was last modified.

changefreq

OPTIONAL: Indicates how frequently the content at a particular URL is likely to change.

  • always
  • hourly
  • daily
  • weekly
  • monthly
  • yearly
  • never

loc

OPTIONAL: The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site. The value for this element is a number between 0.0 and 1.0 where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s). The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Sources