: Why do some websites hide their sitemaps and exclude mentioning it from the robots.txt file? Does this affect SEO at all? A lot of websites hide their sitemap.xml file. What I mean by this

@Angela700

This will not affect your SEO. Any web crawler will be able to find a website's HTML sitemap as long as there is a link pointing to it.

Remember that you can submit your sitemap to most search engines consoles. You do not need to mention it in the robots.txt. Using any search engines console UI you could submit sitemap-name-you-would-like.xml you do not need to specify it in your robots.txt nor a link in your website.

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@Angela700

Hiding a sitemap lowers the odds of a malicious bot to discover your entire website including the links only advertised in a sitemap but not on the website (for example, a special administration page).

There is really no effect on SEO. Only way I'd be concerned SEO wise is if at least one URL listed in any sitemap file results in a non-200 status code result (meaning if the URL does not return an actual webpage).

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