Plan XML sitemaps for a large website
A sitemap structure, splitting rules, and maintenance plan that helps search engines find and refresh the pages that matter.
The prompt
Help me plan the XML sitemaps for my website.
Site type: [e.g. "e-commerce", "news publisher", "marketplace", "documentation site"]
Approximate number of indexable URLs: [NUMBER]
Content types: [products, categories, articles, images, videos, locations, languages]
CMS or platform: [PLATFORM, and whether sitemaps are generated automatically]
Known problems: [e.g. "new products take weeks to get indexed", "Search Console shows many 'Discovered - currently not indexed'"]
Cover:
1. Limits and structure: a single sitemap file holds up to 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed; plan a sitemap index and how to split files (by content type, section, date, or language) so problems are easy to diagnose.
2. What to include: only canonical, indexable URLs that return 200. What to exclude: redirects, noindex pages, parameter duplicates, blocked URLs, thin filter pages.
3. Tags: use accurate lastmod dates (only when content meaningfully changes); explain why priority and changefreq add little for Google.
4. Special sitemaps: image, video, news, and hreflang annotations if they apply to my site.
5. Submission and discovery: robots.txt reference, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools submission.
6. Monitoring: using per-sitemap indexing reports to find sections with poor coverage.
7. Maintenance: how often to regenerate, and automated checks for broken or non-canonical URLs.
Output: a recommended sitemap file plan (table: File | Contents | Approx. URLs | Update frequency), an example of the index file, and a checklist. If something depends on details I haven't given, mark it [CONFIRM].
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore SEO & Website prompts
What to fill in
- NUMBER
- PLATFORM, and whether sitemaps are generated automatically
- CONFIRM
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the Few-Shot structure (Few-shot prompting). A few-shot prompt includes one or more worked examples of the input and the output you want, so the model can copy the pattern instead of guessing it.
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