Sitemap links
Made your sitemap? These are the places to submit it, and the pages to read when you want to know more about sitemaps, search engine crawlers and robots.txt. All of them are free.
Submit your sitemap
- Google Search Console: add your website, then submit the address of your sitemap under Sitemaps. Google shows when it last read the sitemap and how many pages it found in it.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: the same for Bing, which also supplies results to DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and others. You can import your sites from Google Search Console, so you don't have to verify them again. See also our page about Bing sitemaps.
- IndexNow: a way to tell Bing, Yandex and other search engines straight away that a page is new or has changed, instead of waiting until they read your sitemap again.
Learn about sitemaps
- Learn about sitemaps (Google): what a sitemap is, and when your website needs one.
- Build and submit a sitemap (Google): the formats Google accepts, size limits, and the ways to tell Google about your sitemap.
- The sitemap protocol at sitemaps.org: the shared standard of Google, Bing and Yahoo, with every tag explained. Our XML sitemap page shows what a sitemap looks like, and the example sitemap is a real one made by our generator.
- Googlebot (Google): how Google's crawler visits your site, and how to check that a visitor really is Googlebot.
- Introduction to robots.txt (Google) and robotstxt.org, the original site by Martijn Koster, who designed the format. Our spider follows your robots.txt too, so pages you block there stay out of your sitemap.
A bit of history
- Webmaster friendly: the Google blog post from June 2005 that introduced Google Sitemaps. Free Sitemap Generator started later that year.
- Inside Google Sitemaps: the team blog by Vanessa Fox and others from Google, from the early years of sitemaps.
- HTTPS as a ranking signal (2014): when Google started to prefer secure websites. Read how we moved to https ourselves.
- The end of Google's SOAP Search API in 2009, which our indexed pages tracker used: our news item.
More from us
- Why should you create a sitemap? The benefits, in short.
- Frequently asked questions about our generator, the spider and your account.
- Free web services: more free web services for your application or website.
Know a good sitemap resource that should be on this page? Let us know.
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