: Are text sitemaps sufficient to get content indexed by Google or are XML sitemaps needed? I am currently using sitemap.txt (Type: URL List) in Google Search Console. I am not using XML, just

@Holmes151

It doesn't really matter whether you use simple .txt sitemaps or XML sitemaps; Google supports both. Although XML sitemaps do offer greater control and may be easier to manage on a larger site, or if you have different types of content, and text-only sitemaps may not be supported by other search engines.

But as already mentioned in comments, unless a site is hard to crawl in the first place, a sitemap (XML or plain text) is not strictly necessary to get indexed by the search engines. It is simply advisory - a method to allow URL discovery. Even if URLs are contained in a sitemap is no guarantee that they will be indexed. The sitemap itself is not a ranking factor.

However, a sitemap does have other benefits when used with GSC, as Google will report on the index state of just the URLs contained in a sitemap. You could, for instance, have multiple sitemaps for different parts of the site and see how different parts of the site are indexed, rather than only reporting on the whole.

Vote Up Vote Down