Question 1

What is an XML sitemap?

Accepted Answer

An XML sitemap tells search engines which pages to crawl on your website. It lists URLs with optional metadata: lastmod (last modified date), changefreq (how often the page changes), and priority (relative importance).

Question 2

How do I validate a sitemap?

Accepted Answer

Validate against the sitemaps.org XSD schema. Google Search Console also validates sitemaps on submission. Key rules: max 50,000 URLs per sitemap, max 50MB uncompressed, UTF-8 encoding required.

XML Sitemap Sample

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