What is an XML sitemap?
An XML Sitemap is a file that lists your site’s URLs so that search engines can quickly and effectively crawl them. It's needed for automated scanning.
An XML Sitemap is a file that lists your site’s URLs so that search engines can quickly and effectively crawl them. Sitemaps help search engines and other website crawlers, like Google and AccessibleWebBot, find and understand your website’s URLs, the content on each page, and the relationships between pages.
Alongside each URL, XML Sitemaps also list additional metadata, including:
- When the page was last updated
- How often the page typically change
- The priority of each page relative to other URLs on the site
Additionally, sitemaps provide information about specific content on your pages, like videos, images, and news articles. A sitemap is especially important if your website is large or has lots of rich media (video, images, news).
When properly configured, your XML sitemap will stay updated with new pages as they’re added to the site. It’s a dynamic inventory that changes with your website over time.
We recommend using a sitemap to import pages into Accessible Web RAMP for page monitoring. Adding your sitemap to RAMP is also the best way to ensure RAMP stays up-to-date when changes are made to your site and that no pages of your site have been missed.