SOLVED: Where Is My Site Map?

A sitemap is a critical tool for any website owner who wants to make sure their content is properly indexed by search engines like Google. It is a detailed map for search engine bots, like GoogleBot, AppleBot, and AhrefsBot. It’s a file, usually in plain text XML format, that lists all the public pages on your website.

Sitemaps do more than just list URLs. They can also provide valuable information about each page, such as:

• When the page was last updated
• How often the content is likely to change
• How important a page is in relation to other pages on your site

This information helps search engines crawl your site more efficiently, especially for new or updated content.

Why You Can’t Find a Sitemap in FileZilla

Sitemaps used to be a single file that was located at the root of your site like www.URTech.ca/sitemap.xml, but things have changed.

If you’ve ever logged into your WordPress site’s files via an FTP program like FileZilla and gone looking for your sitemap.xml file, you probably came up empty. This is a common point of confusion.

The reason you don’t see it is because modern SEO plugins, like Yoast SEO, don’t create a static, physical file that you can browse to on your server. Instead, they use a dynamic approach. The sitemap is generated on-the-fly, at the exact moment a search engine bot or a person’s browser requests the sitemap URL (e.g., yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml).

This dynamic generation is far more efficient. As soon as you add a new post or page, or update an old one, the plugin automatically updates the sitemap’s internal database. When a search engine bot comes calling, it gets the most up-to-date map of your site, ensuring your latest content is discovered quickly.

Why Are There More Than One Sitemap Files?

For very large websites, there are more than one sitemap file for a simple reason, file size limitations.

Search engines like Google, Bing, and others have a protocol that limits a single sitemap to a maximum of 50,000 URLs and a file size of 50MB (uncompressed). For large websites with hundreds of thousands or even millions of pages, it would be impossible to list everything in a single file. To solve this, the sitemap is automatically split into multiple, smaller files.

How Sitemaps Get Indexed

Even though the site may have many sitemap files, you only need to submit one file to crawlers like Googlebot. This is where the sitemap index file comes in.

1. The Master List: A sitemap index file (typically named sitemap_index.xml) is a master list that contains the URLs of all your individual sitemap files. It is the table of contents for your entire website.
2. The Crawling Process: When you submit this single sitemap_index.xml URL to a search engine, the crawler first downloads and reads it. It then follows the links within that file to find and crawl each of the individual sitemap files, such as post-sitemap.xml, page-sitemap.xml, etc. This ensures that every page on your site is discovered and considered for indexing.

By using this approach, websites can easily manage their content and ensure that all their pages are correctly mapped and discoverable by search engine crawlers, regardless of the site’s size.