Sitemap Optimization

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What It Is

Maintain a clean, accurate XML sitemap that includes only canonical, indexable URLs — removing 301 redirects, noindex pages, and thank-you/confirmation pages — so that Googlebot allocates its crawl budget to your most important content rather than wasting requests on pages that shouldn’t be indexed anyway.

How It Works

1. Crawl all URLs currently in your sitemap with Screaming Frog (File → Upload sitemap) to identify any returning non-200 status codes — 301s, 404s, and noindex pages should all be removed
2. Remove all 301 redirect URLs from the sitemap — Google should only see the canonical destination URL, not the redirect source
3. Add noindex meta tags to thank-you pages, order confirmation pages, and login/account pages, then remove these URLs from the sitemap — these pages should never be indexed and waste crawl budget when they appear in sitemaps
4. Split large sitemaps with more than 50,000 URLs into category-specific sitemaps (posts, products, categories, images) and reference them in a sitemap index file at /sitemap_index.xml
5. Submit the updated sitemap in Google Search Console using the Sitemaps report and monitor the Coverage report over the following 2–4 weeks to verify Googlebot is processing the updated URLs

Who Recommends It

• Jeremy Rivera — SEO Arcade (Sitemap Indexation Trick)endorses
• Jeremy Rivera — SEO Arcade (Thank-You Pages & Sitemaps)endorses

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