XML Sitemap Generator

A sitemap is a list of the URLs you want crawled, in a schema Google and Bing both read. It does not make pages rank. What it does is make them findable — a page nothing links to is a page a crawler reaches by luck, and a sitemap is the way to stop relying on luck.

The alternates are the part other generators leave out. Without them Google reads your English and Arabic pages as competing documents rather than one document in two languages, and picks a winner. Give each URL a xhtml:link for every language it exists in — including itself — and it reads them as a set.

They have to be absolute. A relative href parses, validates against the schema, and is discarded in silence. This site published 936 of them; Search Console reported a number and no hint as to which part was wrong. Pairing here builds the full cluster, self-reference included, because a partial one is worse than none.

changefreq and priority are omitted unless you ask. Google has ignored both for years. A file full of fields nothing reads is a file nobody maintains. What is left is the shape the schema actually requires: a urlset root carrying the namespace, and one loc per page inside it.

Pairing works off the path. Give it the prefix your second language sits under — /ar/ here — and every URL that has a counterpart in the list gets the pair declared on both. A URL with no counterpart gets no alternates at all, which is correct: a cluster of one is not a cluster.

Duplicates are removed and reported. The same URL twice is not an error in the schema and is always a mistake in practice, usually a merge of two exports.

Fifty thousand URLs is the ceiling, or 50MB uncompressed, whichever arrives first. Past that you need several sitemaps and a sitemap index listing them — which is a different file, and the tool says so rather than writing something Google will reject.

Once it is uploaded, add its address to your robots.txt and submit it in Search Console. Both, not either — the robots.txt line is what other crawlers read.