How To Submit Your Sitemap to Google (2024)

Imagine your website is a vast library. A search engine’s role is to catalog every book (web page) in your library to grasp its contents. Yet inviting Google into your library doesn’t ensure it will catalog every book.

Sitemaps act like a library’s index, guiding Google’s crawlers (automated web page indexing bots) to the right shelves, pointing out significant volumes, and indicating which ones to overlook. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide for how to submit sitemaps to Google, ensuring the search engine can navigate your site as easily as a reader navigates a well-organized library.

Why submit your sitemap to Google

• Faster indexing
• More comprehensive crawling
• Enhanced reporting and analysis

Submitting your sitemap to Google is a search engine optimization (SEO) best practice. Sitemaps tell the search engine where to find all the SEO-relevant pages on your website, helping it focus on the pages that matter and overlook less critical pages.

Submitting a sitemap has several SEO benefits, including:

Faster indexing

Google reviews web pages in two steps: crawling and indexing.

Crawling, the first step, is the process by which search engines systematically browse content on the internet. When Google has crawled a page on your site, it means it’s discovered it. It knows it exists but hasn’t judged whether it’s the type of page it wants to show in search results. For example, it has yet to ascertain whether the page is empty, duplicates another, or contains potentially harmful content.

This determination takes place in the second step, indexing. Once Google algorithmically confirms your page is relevant for searchers, it indexes it, adding the page to its giant list of search-result-eligible pages.

Indexing takes considerable bandwidth, so it can take time for Google to get to new pages. Google doesn’t know which pages on your site to prioritize. Submitting a sitemap to Google tells the search engine which pages you consider relevant so it can focus its indexing bandwidth on your most important pages.

More comprehensive crawling

Google generally identifies new pages to crawl through links. When it discovers a link to a new page on an existing page, it follows the link to crawl the new page. However, not all pages contain prominent links from other pages, especially new pages. Submitted sitemaps guarantee that Google doesn’t miss any of your pages, including those without many links. This makes it easier for potential users to find your site when they search Google.

Enhanced reporting and analysis

Google Search Console—formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools—has a suite of tools under its Indexing tab for analyzing how Google views your pages.

However, the standard Pages report includes every page Google detected on your website, whether or not the page is, in fact, relevant. It encompasses both those pages meant for indexing and those not. This can make it hard to identify an issue, like unindexed pages that ought to be indexed.

For example, the site below has more pages “Not indexed” than pages “Indexed”:

However, these 167 “Not indexed” URLs include many pages that are correctly not indexed—primarily non-canonical URLs, meaning alternate versions of pages (such as RSS feed versions or auto-created pages).

For example, the page in the image below is listed under the “Not indexed” report, with the reason “Blocked due to access forbidden (403).” This is correct because the URL is an uploaded image that is irrelevant to searchers.

When you submit your sitemap to Google, you can use a toggle at the top of the Pages report to filter it to sitemap only for a more actionable view of your data. You can also access this data under the Sitemaps tab.

In the image below, we can now see two pages are in the sitemap and not indexed, indicating an error and an opportunity to investigate these pages further.

What to include in your sitemap

The goal of a sitemap is to show crawlers where to find the information they need—not to tell crawlers about the site. Therefore, a typical sitemap file is a simple .xml file. It can also be in HTML, but HTML sitemaps don’t offer SEO value.

The only mandatory elements of a sitemap are web page URLs. A sitemap, in principle, is just a list of URLs on a website. In a standard XML sitemap, each URL in the list is enclosed in a URL and loc element:

Sub-sitemaps

Some websites and content management systems (CMSs) organize their sitemaps with multiple sub-sitemaps—sections of a website’s overall sitemap structure. For example, on Shopify stores, sitemaps are automatically generated with sub-sitemaps for products, pages, collections, and blogs, and look something like this:

<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

    <!-- This parent sitemap links to additional sitemaps for products, collections, and pages, as shown below. The sitemap cannot be manually edited but is updated in real-time. -->

    <sitemap>

        <loc>https://duer.ca/sitemap_products_1.xml?from=9036854092&to=7191923490868</loc>

    </sitemap>

    <sitemap>

        <loc>https://duer.ca/sitemap_pages_1.xml</loc>

    </sitemap>

    <sitemap>

        <loc>https://duer.ca/sitemap_collections_1.xml</loc>

    </sitemap>

    <sitemap>

        <loc>https://duer.ca/sitemap_blogs_1.xml</loc>

    </sitemap>

</sitemapindex>

Change frequency

Change frequency gives search engines a frame of reference for how often the page is expected to change, so they know how regularly to crawl it. Shopify sitemaps default to daily.

Last modified date

The last modified date helps search engines understand if a page needs to be crawled again by comparing the last crawl date to the last modified date. Shopify sitemaps include and update this by default.

Image/video context

Image/video context helps search engines understand the primary image on a page—in other words, the image that best represents the page as a whole. This is often the same as the page’s OpenGraph image (primary image for link previews on social media). Image/video context is becoming more helpful as search engines move toward including image previews of web pages in search results.

Here’s an example of a single Shopify product page within a Products sitemap that includes change frequency (<changefreq>), last modified date (<lastmod>), and image details (<image:image>):

<url>

    <loc>https://duer.ca/products/mens-performance-stretch-belt</loc>

    <lastmod>2023-12-10T17:56:01-08:00</lastmod>

    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>

    <image:image>

        <image:loc>https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1623/9935/products/MAYX8506_Black_Belt_0120_f0995fb6-23c9-443c-b829-2ca079bdb728.jpg?v=1660868722</image:loc>

        <image:title>Performance Stretch Belt</image:title>

        <image:caption>Men's Black Performance Stretch Belt Side</image:caption>

    </image:image>

</url>

How to submit a sitemap to Google

1. Create your sitemap
2. Register and verify your site for Google Search Console
3. Go to Indexing > Sitemaps and submit

Submitting your sitemap to Google Search does not take long, provided you have full access to your CMS and site. Here’s how to do it:

1. Create your sitemap

Your CMS may generate a sitemap for you, or you can use a sitemap generator tool. Although you can technically create a sitemap manually, it won’t update regularly enough to remain valid. 

Shopify auto-generates sitemaps for all Shopify stores at your-site.com/sitemap.xml. For CMSs that don’t generate one automatically, like WordPress, you can add free plug-ins like Yoast to create a sitemap automatically.

2. Register and verify your site for Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free Google tool for website performance and search insights, but it requires verifiable proof that you have the right to see the data and make changes to your site. Therefore, its login requirements are more involved than those of a regular tool. 

When you first register for Search Console, it asks you to complete one of the following tasks to verify ownership of your site:

• Upload a .txt file to your server. (This is the preferred verification method because it gives you full domain access, whereas the other options only give you partial access.)
• Integrate Search Console with another Google-owned tool, such as Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager.
• Upload an HTML file or tag to your site.

Once you’ve completed verification, it can take up to 48 hours for Search Console to populate with data, but you can upload your sitemap immediately.

3. Go to Indexing > Sitemaps and submit

In your Google Search Console account, find Sitemaps under the Indexing section of the left sidebar navigation and submit your sitemap URL in the form. Then click Submit.

Wait for the status to show “Success.” This can take up to 48 hours. Once successful, you can see your entire sitemap submission history in this view.

If your site has sub-sitemaps, there’s no need to submit each individually. You only need to submit the top-level sitemap index.