The Sitemap tab builds a sitemap.xml of the pages search engines should index, from your latest scans, and shows what to change in the sitemap your site publishes today. Viewing it is on every plan and costs no credits; the download is on Starter and up.
Open Site Crawler, then Sitemap, and pick a site from My Sites.
Which pages go in
A page is in the new sitemap when it is one of the site's own HTML pages, it works, the latest scan found it, and it may be indexed: it has no noindex and its canonical does not point to another page. Indexing comes from a detailed scan, so a site with only fast scans has no pages to list yet. Pages with a query string are left out.
A sitemap may only list URLs of its own host. When a site has pages on both www and the bare domain, the sitemap keeps the one most pages are on.
What to remove and what to add
- Remove from your sitemap: pages the current sitemap lists that answer an error, redirect, say noindex or point their canonical to another page. Search engines read every URL a sitemap lists, so these waste their time and can make them trust the sitemap less.
- Add to your sitemap: indexable pages the current sitemap does not list.
The comparison needs a scan that read the site's current sitemap in full. When none did, the tab says so and only builds the new sitemap.
Download and publish
Download sitemap.xml gives a file ready to upload to the root of your site. Past 50,000 URLs, the limit of the sitemap protocol, you get a zip of numbered sitemap files and a sitemap-index.xml that points to them; upload them all to the root. Then submit the sitemap, or the index, in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and make sure robots.txt names it.
The file lists each URL only. It has no lastmod: PerfBee does not know when a page last changed, and a guessed date teaches search engines to ignore the field.