What is XML Sitemaps?

XML sitemaps are digital maps that help Google discover important pages on your site and how often they are being updated.

Google states on its help center page:

“ A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page.”

The robots.txt helps you to exclude parts of your site from being ranked in search engines, XML sitemaps do the opposite. They help search engines discover new pages – even when they are not linked from the main site.