Question 1

Does submitting a sitemap guarantee Google will index those pages?

Accepted Answer

No — a sitemap is a request, not a command. Google uses the sitemap to discover URLs and prioritise crawling, but indexation decisions are made based on Google's assessment of each page's quality, relevance, and uniqueness. A page submitted in the sitemap that Google considers thin, duplicate, or low-quality will be listed as "Crawled, currently not indexed" in Search Console — Google visited it but chose not to index it. Fixing the content quality or uniqueness issue is what gets it indexed, not resubmitting the sitemap.

Question 2

Do I need a sitemap if my site is small?

Accepted Answer

Technically, Google can discover pages through crawling internal links without a sitemap. For small sites (under 100 pages) with strong internal linking, a sitemap provides minimal additional benefit. However, it's still useful for: signalling which version of a URL is canonical when you have www/non-www or trailing slash variations; getting new content indexed faster (Google checks submitted sitemaps regularly); and monitoring indexation coverage in Search Console. The effort to set one up is low, so it's worth doing even on small sites — just make sure it stays clean.

Question 3

How often does Google re-crawl the sitemap?

Accepted Answer

Google re-fetches submitted sitemaps regularly — typically every few days to a week for active sites, though this varies based on site authority and crawl rate. When you publish new content, you don't need to manually resubmit the sitemap; Google will pick it up on its regular schedule. If you need faster indexation of a specific new page, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console → Request Indexing — this queues the individual URL for crawling independently of the sitemap schedule.

Question 4

Should images and videos have their own sitemaps?

Accepted Answer

Image and video sitemaps are supplementary — they help Google discover media files and associated metadata (captions, titles, licences) that might not be obvious from crawling the page HTML alone. For most content-focused sites, they're not necessary. They become more useful when: you have large libraries of original images you want indexed in Google Images; you're hosting videos directly on your site (not on YouTube) and want them to appear in video search results; or your media is loaded dynamically and may not be discovered through normal page crawling. If you're running a standard blog or service site, prioritise getting your page sitemap right before worrying about media sitemaps.

Question 5

How do I know which URLs are actually in my sitemap right now?

Accepted Answer

Open the sitemap URL directly in a browser — most CMS-generated sitemaps render as readable XML or an HTML table. For a full audit, download it and run it through a crawler like Screaming Frog's list mode, which will check each URL's status code, indexability, and canonical tag in bulk and flag anything that shouldn't be there (noindexed pages, redirects, non-canonical URLs). This is worth doing quarterly, not just after something looks wrong in Search Console.

Question 6

What's the difference between a sitemap and a sitemap index?

Accepted Answer

A sitemap lists individual page URLs directly. A sitemap index is a sitemap of sitemaps — it lists the locations of multiple child sitemap files rather than pages themselves, used when a site exceeds the 50,000-URL or 50MB single-file limit, or simply to keep content types organized separately (posts, pages, products). You submit the sitemap index URL to Search Console, and Google follows it to find and crawl each child sitemap automatically.

XML sitemap

XML Sitemaps Done Right: What to Include (and Leave Out)