Sitemap

Each urlset entry connects a loc address with optional metadata such as lastmod. A large site can split URLs across files and connect them through a sitemap index. The file supplements internal links rather than replacing site structure.

Section sources:[1] Google Search Central[2] Google Search Central

A sitemap announces URLs, robots.txt governs crawling, canonical identifies a preferred representation, and indexing remains the search engine's decision. RSS can announce recent publications but is generally not a complete registry of canonical pages.

Section sources:[1] Google Search Central[2] Google Search Central

For a bilingual site, a shared sitemap index can point to RU and EN sitemaps. Each lists actual HTML pages, while canonical and hreflang on the pages should agree with those addresses.

Check XML syntax, successful responses for every loc, absence of redirects and 404s, self-canonicals, accurate lastmod, and sitemap-index consistency. After submission, inspect the search engine's report separately: accepting the file is not the same as indexing every URL.

A sitemap does not improve a weak page or prove that a crawler read its contents. Adding many thin URLs makes them discoverable but not useful and can make indexing diagnosis harder.