Sitemap

An example

A blog with two posts. Each <url> is one page: its full address and the day it last really changed.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://bakery.example/blog/wedding-cake-guide</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-28</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://bakery.example/blog/gluten-free-birthday-cakes</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-14</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Then one line in your robots.txt tells every search engine where it is:

Sitemap: https://bakery.example/sitemap.xml

Why it matters for a small-business blog

Search engines find pages by following links. A new blog has almost none from other sites, so its posts are found slowly. Google names exactly this case, a new site with few links to it, as one where a sitemap helps.

Google also says a small site whose pages are all linked from its home page may not need one. A blog shown through a script or a builder widget is often not in the site’s own sitemap at all, though, so check that your posts are listed somewhere.

Common mistakes

• Listing pages you do not want found. Drafts, pages marked noindex and addresses that redirect do not belong in it. List the address you want in results.
• Short addresses. Google asks for full addresses (https://…) and crawls them exactly as written.
• A lastmod that changes every day. Google uses it only when it is “consistently and verifiably accurate”: change it when the post changes, not when the footer does.
• Tuning priority and changefreq. Google ignores both.
• Never telling anyone. Name the sitemap in robots.txt, or submit it in Search Console’s Sitemaps report.
• Expecting it to get pages indexed. Google calls a sitemap a hint. A page still has to be worth indexing.

How CMSKite handles it

• On the free blog link, each blog has its own sitemap, listed in the one that robots.txt on cmskite.com names, and a post is in it once you publish. There is nothing to do. Once your own site shows the posts, they are listed at your site’s addresses instead (below).
• With the two-line embed, your website does not know your posts, so its own sitemap leaves them out. We keep one for you at https://cmskite.com/b/your-blog/site-sitemap.xml, with each post at its address on your site. Add the Sitemap: line for it to your robots.txt: Google accepts a sitemap on another site when your robots.txt names it. Steps for each host are in the embed guide.
• Through the API, GET /v1/blog/sitemap lists every published post at its address on your site, as JSON or, with ?format=xml, as a sitemap your /sitemap.xml can serve as it is. See Making your posts findable.
• All of them leave out drafts and posts marked “keep out of search”, and give each post the date it last changed as its lastmod.

Sources

• What is a sitemap — Google Search Central
• Build and submit a sitemap — Google Search Central
• Sitemaps XML format — sitemaps.org

Checked on 4 October 2026.