XML Sitemap and robots.txt Guide

Two of the most fundamental files for communicating with search engines are the XML sitemap and the robots.txt file. These elements don’t directly impact how well your content ranks, but they do play a key role in how efficiently search engines discover and understand your site.

When configured properly, they help ensure that your important content is found quickly and that unnecessary or low-value pages don’t consume crawl budget.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a structured list of URLs that you want search engines to discover and index. It's written in XML format and submitted to search engines via tools like Google Search Console. The sitemap acts like a roadmap for your website, showing crawlers where to go and what to prioritize.

Each entry in the sitemap includes a URL and may also include optional metadata, such as:

The last modified date of the page
The expected change frequency
The priority of the page relative to others

You don’t need to include every page on your site - only those that are important, indexable, and should appear in search results. Pages with noindex tags, redirects, or canonical links pointing elsewhere typically shouldn’t be in your sitemap.

Why Sitemaps Matter

While Google can discover pages through internal links, large or complex websites often have areas that are harder to reach or less frequently crawled. A sitemap helps:

Speed up discovery of new or updated content
Highlight pages buried deep in your site structure
Assist with indexing in cases where JavaScript is involved
Improve visibility for e-commerce sites, blogs, or large archives

Submitting a sitemap doesn’t guarantee indexing, but it signals intent and provides a clean inventory of what matters.

Best Practices for XML Sitemaps

Include only canonical, indexable URLs - Avoid duplicates, parameterized URLs, and redirected pages.
Update modification dates accurately - This helps crawlers focus on what’s new or recently changed.
Split large sitemaps - If you have more than 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed, break your sitemap into parts and use a sitemap index file.
Keep the sitemap updated - Automate updates if your site changes frequently.
Submit the sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools - This ensures search engines are aware of its existence and can track processing.

What Is robots.txt File?

The robots.txt file is a plain-text file located at the root of your domain (e.g. example.com/robots.txt). It provides directives to search engine crawlers, telling them which parts of your site they’re allowed (or disallowed) from accessing.

It’s important to understand that robots.txt is a crawl directive, not an indexing directive. Disallowing a page in robots.txt won’t prevent it from appearing in search results if it’s already indexed or linked to externally.

Common Use Cases for robots.txt

Prevent crawling of internal or admin areas (e.g. /admin/, /checkout/, /cart/)
Block access to dynamic or duplicate URLs with tracking parameters
Exclude large archives or filtered category pages that waste crawl budget
Avoid indexing of certain assets (although not recommended for critical CSS/JS)

For example:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /search-results/
Disallow: /*?sessionid=

This tells all user agents (bots) not to crawl the specified directories or URLs with certain patterns.

What Not to Use robots.txt For

Blocking pages you want to remove from Google’s index - use noindex meta tags instead.
Blocking essential scripts and styles - Google needs to render your pages to understand layout and functionality.
Trying to “hide” sensitive data - robots.txt is public and should not be used for security purposes.

Best Practices (for robots.txt)

Keep it simple and specific - overblocking can unintentionally prevent important pages from being crawled.
Test your file using the robots.txt Tester in Google Search Console to make sure it behaves as expected.
Combine it with proper on-page directives like noindex or canonical tags for more precise control.
Ensure the file is accessible at https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt and returns a 200 status code.

Sitemaps and robots.txt Work Together

Although sitemaps and robots.txt serve different purposes, they complement each other. The sitemap invites crawlers to access and prioritize important content. The robots.txt file sets boundaries on what should be crawled.

It’s important to avoid conflicting signals. For example, do not include a URL in your sitemap if it’s disallowed in robots.txt - Google will be confused about your intent.

To improve crawl efficiency:

Allow crawling of all indexable pages in robots.txt
Include those same pages in your sitemap
Use noindex (on-page) instead of Disallow if you want the page discovered but not indexed