Sitemaps for every kind of content.

What a sitemap does

A sitemap is a file that lists the pages on your site you want search engines to know about. Search engines can find pages by following links, and on a small, well-linked site they usually will. A sitemap makes that discovery faster and more reliable, and it tells search engines when each page last changed, so they know what’s worth recrawling.

A sitemap doesn’t force a page into search results. Search engines still decide what to index based on quality and relevance. What a sitemap does is make sure nothing important is missed because it’s buried deep in your site, newly published or not yet linked from anywhere.

How Rilea SEO organises your sitemaps

Rilea SEO creates a sitemap index at /sitemap_index.xml. The index is a short file that points to separate sitemaps for each kind of content:

• One sitemap for each post type, such as posts, pages and products
• One sitemap for each taxonomy, such as categories, tags and product categories
• An author sitemap, if you include author archives
• A news sitemap, if you turn it on
• A video sitemap, if you turn it on
• A locations sitemap, if you use local SEO with public location pages

Splitting sitemaps by type keeps each one manageable and lets you see in Search Console how each type of content is being indexed. You can set how many links go in each sitemap file; if a type has more, Rilea SEO splits it into numbered parts automatically. Sitemaps are cached, so they’re quick to serve and don’t put load on your site each time a crawler asks for them, and they’re styled so they’re readable if you open them in a browser.

What’s included, and what’s left out

By default, the sitemaps include the public content you’d expect to see in search. You decide the details in Rilea SEO, then Settings, then Sitemaps:

• Post types and taxonomies. Include the ones that contain pages people search for. Leave out types that exist only for internal use.
• Images. Rilea SEO can list the images in each piece of content alongside its URL, which helps image search.
• Author archives. Include them if your author pages are useful, or leave them out on single-author sites where they’d duplicate the blog.
• Excluded posts. Enter the IDs of specific posts or pages you want left out, or tick the exclude option in a page’s Rilea SEO panel.

As a rule, a sitemap should only list pages you want indexed. Pages set to noindex, thank-you pages, cart and checkout pages, and thin archive pages don’t belong there. Listing a page you’ve also told search engines not to index sends mixed signals.

Google News sitemap

If your site publishes news and appears in Google News, a news sitemap helps Google find new articles within minutes rather than hours. It lists your recently published articles with their publication name, language and publication date.

Turn it on in the Sitemaps tab, enter your publication name exactly as it appears in Google News, and choose which post types hold news articles. The news sitemap appears at /news-sitemap.xml. Google only uses news sitemaps for recent articles, so it’s normal for the file to list just your latest stories. For individual articles, the NewsArticle schema type gives search engines the same information in structured form.

Video sitemap

Search engines can show videos in results and in video search, but only if they know the video exists and what it’s about. Rilea SEO’s video sitemap detects YouTube, Vimeo and self-hosted video embedded in your posts and lists each one with the page it appears on. Turn it on in the Sitemaps tab, and it appears at /video-sitemap.xml.

For a page built around a single video, choose the Video schema type in the Rilea SEO panel and add a title, description, thumbnail and duration. That gives search engines richer information than the sitemap alone.

IndexNow

Sitemaps work by waiting: search engines check them on their own schedule. IndexNow works the other way. When you publish, update or delete a page, Rilea SEO sends a notification straight away to participating search engines, including Bing and Yandex, so they can crawl the change sooner.

Turn it on in Rilea SEO, then Settings, then IndexNow, and choose which post types to submit. Rilea SEO creates the key file that proves you own the site and handles submissions automatically. You can also submit a page manually from its Rilea SEO panel, or submit several pages at once from the posts list.

Google doesn’t use IndexNow. For Google, your sitemap and the URL Inspection tool in Search Console remain the way to signal changes.

robots.txt

The robots.txt file tells crawlers which parts of your site they may visit, and it’s the standard place to point them to your sitemap. Rilea SEO adds your sitemap line to robots.txt automatically. If you need custom rules, edit robots.txt in Rilea SEO, then Settings, then General. Leave the field empty to use WordPress’s default.

Be careful with robots.txt. A single wrong line can block search engines from your whole site. Blocking a page in robots.txt also doesn’t remove it from search results; to keep a page out of the index, use noindex instead.

Submitting your sitemap

Google Search Console

1. Open your property in Search Console.
2. Go to Sitemaps.
3. Enter sitemap_index.xml in the “Add a new sitemap” field and click Submit.

Search Console then shows when it last read the sitemap, whether it succeeded and how many pages it discovered. On a new property, the status can show “Couldn’t fetch” for a short time after the first submission; it usually updates once Google processes it.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Open Sitemaps, choose to submit a sitemap, and enter the full URL of your sitemap index. Bing also reads the sitemap line in your robots.txt.

You only need to submit once. After that, search engines check the sitemap regularly, and IndexNow covers the engines that support it.

Reading the results

In Search Console, the Sitemaps report shows each sitemap you’ve submitted and how many URLs it contains. The Pages report, under Indexing, shows which pages are indexed and why others aren’t. Common reasons include “Crawled, currently not indexed”, which usually points to thin or duplicate content, and “Excluded by noindex tag”, which is expected for pages you’ve chosen to hide.

If many pages in your sitemap aren’t being indexed, the sitemap is doing its job. The pages themselves need attention: more useful content, better internal links, or consolidation with similar pages.

Troubleshooting

• The sitemap shows a 404. Go to Settings, then Permalinks, and click Save. This refreshes WordPress’s URL rules. Clear your page cache too.
• The sitemap shows old content. Sitemaps are cached. Saving a post updates the relevant sitemap; if a caching plugin or CDN also caches the file, clear it.
• Search Console can’t fetch it. Open the sitemap in a private browser window. If it loads, wait and resubmit. If it doesn’t, check that a security plugin or firewall isn’t blocking it.
• A page is missing. Check it isn’t set to noindex or excluded, that its post type is included, and that it’s published.

Sitemaps on Shopify

Shopify generates a sitemap for every store at /sitemap.xml and keeps it up to date as you add products, collections, pages and blog posts. Rilea SEO for Shopify works alongside it today, and its “noindex, follow” option keeps items in Shopify’s sitemap while asking search engines not to index them. Sitemap controls, a robots.txt builder and IndexNow for Shopify are planned for a later release.

Sitemaps for different kinds of site

Small business sites with a few dozen pages rarely have indexing problems. A sitemap still helps new pages get found quickly, and it gives you a useful report in Search Console. Include pages and posts, and leave out tags and author archives unless they’re genuinely useful.

Blogs benefit from including posts and categories. If you use tags heavily and each tag has only one or two posts, consider leaving tags out of the sitemap and setting thin tag archives to noindex, which Rilea SEO can do automatically for empty archives.

Online stores should include products and product categories, and leave out cart, checkout and account pages. Image sitemaps matter more for stores, because product images can bring visitors through image search.

News publishers should turn on the news sitemap and IndexNow, so new stories reach search engines as quickly as possible.

Video-heavy sites should turn on the video sitemap and use the Video schema type on pages built around a single video.

Large sites

On sites with tens of thousands of pages, sitemaps become a tool for managing crawl attention as well as discovery. A few habits help:

• Keep sitemaps clean. Every URL should return a normal page, be indexable and be the canonical version. Redirected, broken or noindexed URLs waste crawl attention.
• Split by type. Rilea SEO already separates post types and taxonomies. Use the Search Console report for each sitemap to spot which type has indexing problems.
• Watch the lastmod dates. Search engines use the last-modified date to decide what to recrawl. Updating a post’s content updates its date, so avoid making trivial edits to many posts at once just to refresh them.
• Use IndexNow for changes. On large sites, waiting for sitemaps to be recrawled can take time. IndexNow notifies participating engines immediately.

How often to check

Once your sitemaps are set up and submitted, they look after themselves. A quick check once a month is enough for most sites: open the Sitemaps report in Search Console to confirm the last read date is recent and the status is Success, then glance at the Pages report for any new indexing problems. Check again after big changes, such as a redesign, a new section of the site or a change to your URL structure, because those are the moments when pages most often go missing.