Site Map

HelpGuides automatically generates a sitemap.xml file listing every published article on your site. Search engines use it to find your content and to see when it last changed. There's nothing to set up, and it updates as you publish.

Where to find the Sitemap.xml file

The sitemap is at the root of your site. For example:

Your robots.txt file also points search engines to it.

What's in the sitemap

• One entry for each published article, using your canonical domain. Drafts, unlisted articles, scheduled articles and deleted articles are left out.
• Each entry's lastmod date is the date the article was last updated.
• If Force Trailing Slash is on in Settings → Advanced, URLs end with a slash.
• If you use Pages, published pages are included too. They're also listed on their own at /pages-sitemap.xml.

The sitemap is cached for up to 3 hours, so a newly published article can take that long to appear.

Submit your sitemap

Submit your sitemap URL in Google Search Console and in Bing Webmaster Tools so both search engines crawl your articles regularly. See Bing Webmaster Tools for the steps.

Keep articles out of search results

• One article: in the editor, click Advanced and turn off Allow Indexing on the SEO tab. The article gets a noindex tag, so search engines leave it out of their results.
• Your whole site: turn off Allow Search Engine Indexing in Settings → General. Your robots.txt then asks search engines not to crawl any page.

See Finding Broken Links with the SEO Report for more on these settings, and Feeds and Machine-Readable Formats for your site's other machine-readable files.