Question 1

How do I convert an XML sitemap to CSV?

Accepted Answer

Convert an XML sitemap to CSV in three steps: get the sitemap URL or file, parse the entries, and write each URL as a row alongside optional lastmod, changefreq and priority columns. The fastest path is a web converter — paste the sitemap URL, click convert, download the CSV. The xmlsitemapmaker.com converter handles XML sitemaps, sitemap-index files (followed automatically), HTML sitemap pages and plain-text URL lists, and exports CSV, Excel, TXT or JSON. For one-off conversions you can also use Excel's built-in importer (Data → Get Data → From XML), but it doesn't follow sitemap-index files and Excel mangles long URLs. For scripting, Python's xml.etree.ElementTree handles namespaces cleanly.

Question 2

How do I convert an XML sitemap to Excel?

Accepted Answer

Convert an XML sitemap to Excel either through Excel's built-in XML importer (Data → Get Data → From File → From XML, then point at the sitemap URL or downloaded .xml file) or with a web converter that emits a real .xlsx file. Excel's native importer works for small, simple sitemaps but doesn't follow sitemap-index files, sometimes mangles long URLs into scientific notation, and won't handle gzipped (.xml.gz) sitemaps. The xmlsitemapmaker.com converter handles all of these — follows the index, preserves URL strings as text, auto-sizes the URL column — and outputs a real .xlsx workbook, not a renamed CSV. Drop in a URL, click Convert, open the file directly in Excel.

Question 3

Can Excel open an XML sitemap directly?

Accepted Answer

Yes — Excel can open an XML sitemap directly via Data → Get Data → From File → From XML (or the older File → Open with 'As XML table'). It parses the urlset and lays out , , and as columns. The catch: Excel can't follow sitemap-index files (it only reads the index entries themselves, not the child sitemaps), it can't decompress .xml.gz sitemaps, and it sometimes treats numeric-looking URLs as numbers. For a sitemap-index, manually open each child sitemap or use a tool that follows the index automatically. For most one-off conversions an online converter is faster and cleaner than wrestling with Excel's importer.

Question 4

How do I convert a sitemap-index to a single CSV?

Accepted Answer

A sitemap-index is an XML file that references multiple child sitemaps instead of listing URLs directly. To convert it to a single CSV, fetch the index, then fetch every child sitemap, then merge all URLs into one deduplicated list. The xmlsitemapmaker.com converter does this automatically — paste the sitemap-index URL and it fans out, fetches each child in parallel, dedupes, and emits one CSV with an extra Source Sitemap column so you can trace each URL back to the file it came from. Excel's built-in XML importer can't do this — it stops at the index and just shows the child sitemap URLs, not the millions of URLs inside them.

Question 5

How do I convert an HTML sitemap to CSV?

Accepted Answer

An HTML sitemap is a normal webpage that lists internal links — usually at /sitemap or /sitemap.html — rather than the machine-readable XML at /sitemap.xml. To convert it to CSV, parse the page's HTML, pull every <a href> value, resolve relative URLs against the page URL, dedupe, and write to CSV. Don't try this in Excel — its XML importer won't parse HTML. The xmlsitemapmaker.com HTML sitemap converter handles all of this in one step: paste the URL of the HTML sitemap, get back a CSV of every internal link, fully-qualified and deduplicated. Useful when the site doesn't publish an XML sitemap, or when /sitemap.xml is incorrectly serving an HTML response.

Question 6

Can Notepad++ convert XML to CSV?

Accepted Answer

Not directly — Notepad++ is a text editor, not a converter. You can open an XML sitemap in it to inspect the structure, but turning it into CSV requires either find-and-replace gymnastics with regular expressions (fragile, breaks on escaped characters) or a plugin like XML Tools. The cleaner path is a dedicated converter: paste the sitemap URL or file content into an online tool and download CSV directly. The xmlsitemapmaker.com converter handles the parsing correctly, including entity escaping, namespaces and CDATA blocks that Notepad++ regex would miss. If you really want a manual approach, Excel's Data → From XML works for small simple sitemaps without needing any plugin.

Question 7

How do I convert an XML sitemap to CSV in Python?

Accepted Answer

Python's standard library handles this in about 15 lines. Use urllib.request.urlopen to fetch the sitemap, xml.etree.ElementTree to parse it, and the csv module to write rows. The one gotcha is the XML namespace — sitemap files declare xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-0.9", so you need to use the namespace prefix in your findall, e.g. root.findall('{http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-0.9}url'). For sitemap-index files, recurse into each child sitemap. Skip BeautifulSoup unless you also need to parse HTML sitemaps — for pure XML, etree is faster and ships with Python. If you don't want to write code, the xmlsitemapmaker.com converter does the same thing through a URL.

Question 8

What columns should my sitemap CSV have?

Accepted Answer

At minimum, your sitemap CSV needs one column: URL. The standard sitemap protocol defines three optional fields that become columns when present: Last Modified (lastmod), Change Frequency (changefreq) and Priority (priority). If you converted from a sitemap-index, add a Source Sitemap column so you can trace each URL back to the child sitemap it came from. xmlsitemapmaker.com adds these conditionally — if the sitemap doesn't declare priority or changefreq, those columns are omitted rather than filled with empty strings. Wider columns (image URLs, video metadata, alternates for hreflang) are excluded by default because they bloat the file and most workflows don't need them.

Question 9

How do I keep lastmod, changefreq and priority columns?

Accepted Answer

Make sure the original sitemap declares those fields — converters can only output columns that exist in the source. Open the sitemap in a browser and check whether each entry contains , and tags. If they're missing, no converter can produce them; the sitemap simply doesn't track that data. If they're present but missing from your CSV, the converter is probably stripping them — xmlsitemapmaker.com keeps every present field by default and only omits the column when no URL in the sitemap has a value for it. For sitemap-index files, each child sitemap might have different field coverage; we union them so the CSV includes every column at least one URL uses.

Question 10

How do I get just the URLs, no other columns?

Accepted Answer

Use the TXT export format instead of CSV. TXT outputs one URL per line with no header row, no quoting and no metadata — just URLs. It's the smallest, cleanest possible export and ideal for Screaming Frog list mode, an xargs curl loop, or any URL-driven workflow that doesn't care about lastmod or priority. On xmlsitemapmaker.com, switch the export format dropdown to TXT and click Convert. If you specifically want a CSV with only the URL column, that's also fine — open the CSV in any editor and delete the other columns, or pre-filter by passing only --columns=url to a CLI converter.

Question 11

How do I convert an XML sitemap to JSON?

Accepted Answer

Convert an XML sitemap to JSON by parsing each <url> entry into an object with url, lastmod, changefreq, priority and (for sitemap-index conversions) source fields, then emitting an array. The output is much friendlier than CSV for scripts, AI agents, n8n flows and dashboards that consume JSON natively. On xmlsitemapmaker.com, switch the export format to JSON and click Convert — you get a pretty-printed array of objects, with optional fields omitted (not set to null) when the sitemap doesn't declare them. The JSON format also preserves URL strings cleanly without the CSV quoting rules, which matters when URLs contain commas, equals signs or unicode characters.

Question 12

How do I convert a gzipped sitemap (.xml.gz)?

Accepted Answer

Decompress the file first, then convert it. On macOS or Linux: gunzip sitemap.xml.gz produces sitemap.xml. On Windows, 7-Zip or WinRAR handle it. Most browsers also decompress .xml.gz when you visit the URL — open it directly and View Source to see the raw XML. Once decompressed, paste the content into the converter or upload the .xml file. xmlsitemapmaker.com doesn't currently auto-decompress .xml.gz client-side, so do this step yourself. If the file is gzipped because the sitemap is huge (>50 MB uncompressed), consider whether it should be split into a sitemap-index instead — large gzipped sitemaps are a sign the site is past the protocol's per-file ceiling.

Question 13

How many child sitemaps can the converter handle?

Accepted Answer

xmlsitemapmaker.com follows up to 50 child sitemaps per sitemap-index by default, fetched in parallel. That covers the vast majority of real-world sites — most large sites split content into 5–20 child sitemaps. For sites with hundreds of children (huge e-commerce catalogs, multi-locale platforms), download each child sitemap separately and run multiple conversions, then concatenate the CSVs. Each individual sitemap is bounded to 25 MB per fetch. The 50-child limit exists to keep one conversion request well within Cloudflare Workers' subrequest budget; on a paid plan with concurrency limiting we can raise that to 200+ in a future release. If you hit the cap, the preview shows how many children were successfully fetched.

Question 14

How do I deduplicate URLs across multiple sitemaps?

Accepted Answer

When merging multiple sitemaps (or following a sitemap-index), the same URL can legitimately appear in more than one child sitemap — typically when a site splits sitemaps by content type but a URL belongs to two types. xmlsitemapmaker.com deduplicates by URL string on every conversion, so you never see duplicates in the output. If you're doing it yourself in Excel: Data → Remove Duplicates → check only the URL column. In Python: pass the URL list through dict.fromkeys(urls) or a set to dedupe while preserving order. Be careful with URLs that differ only by trailing slash or fragment — decide whether those should be treated as duplicates before deduplication, because most tools treat them as distinct.

Question 15

How do I import a sitemap CSV into Screaming Frog list mode?

Accepted Answer

In Screaming Frog: Mode → List, then Upload → From a File, and point at the CSV (or paste the URL column). List mode crawls only the URLs you provide — perfect for auditing a sitemap's URLs without crawling the whole site. If your CSV has multiple columns, Screaming Frog will use only the first column by default; either reorder so URL is first, or save a URL-only TXT file from xmlsitemapmaker.com using the TXT export. Crawl size is limited to 500 URLs on the free version; upgrade for unlimited list mode. For 100,000+ URL sitemaps, break the CSV into chunks and crawl in batches to manage memory.

Question 16

How do I import a sitemap CSV into Google Sheets?

Accepted Answer

Two ways. First: File → Import → Upload, drop the CSV file, choose 'Replace current sheet' or 'Insert new sheet'. Google Sheets auto-detects commas and quotes, handles UTF-8 correctly, and keeps long URLs as plain text (unlike Excel, which sometimes truncates them). Second: paste the sitemap URL into a cell using =IMPORTXML("https://example.com/sitemap.xml", "//*[local-name()='loc']") — this fetches and parses the XML in-place, no download needed, and re-runs on every refresh. The IMPORTXML approach is great for dashboards but slow on huge sitemaps and doesn't follow sitemap-index files. For one-off audits, convert to CSV first.

Question 17

How do I import a sitemap CSV into BigQuery?

Accepted Answer

Upload the CSV to a Google Cloud Storage bucket, then create a BigQuery table from it: BigQuery → Create Table → Source = Google Cloud Storage → File format CSV → tick 'Auto-detect schema'. The schema becomes one column per CSV column (URL, lastmod, changefreq, priority, source). For lastmod values in W3C/ISO 8601 format, change that column's type from STRING to TIMESTAMP for date-range queries. If you're loading huge sitemaps regularly, automate with the bq command-line tool: bq load --autodetect dataset.sitemap gs://bucket/sitemap.csv. JSON exports (see /sitemap-to-json) work too and preserve nested data better, but CSV is faster to ingest and cheaper to store.

Question 18

How do I import a sitemap CSV into Ahrefs or Semrush?

Accepted Answer

Neither Ahrefs nor Semrush import a CSV directly — they pull URL lists. The flow is: convert the sitemap to a one-URL-per-line TXT file (use xmlsitemapmaker.com's TXT export), then paste into Ahrefs Site Audit → 'Custom URLs' or Semrush Site Audit → 'Custom URL list'. Both tools cap manual lists around 10,000–20,000 URLs depending on plan. For larger sets, host the sitemap publicly and point Ahrefs/Semrush at the sitemap URL itself — both crawlers follow sitemap-index files natively. CSV import is more useful for analytics tools that need structured columns (lastmod for content-decay analysis, source for sitemap coverage breakdown).

Question 19

How do I get 100,000+ sitemap URLs into Excel?

Accepted Answer

Excel can technically handle 1,048,576 rows per sheet, but real-world performance degrades past ~200k rows — opening, filtering and saving slow down dramatically. For a 100k-URL sitemap, three options. First: convert to .xlsx and open it — works for analysis, save changes only when needed. Second: import the CSV via Power Query (Data → Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV) which streams data and is faster than the legacy importer. Third (best for huge sets): keep the data in Google Sheets, BigQuery or DuckDB and skip Excel entirely. xmlsitemapmaker.com handles sitemap-index files up to several million URLs in one conversion — the bottleneck is downstream, not the converter.

Question 20

Why does Excel break long URLs in my CSV?

Accepted Answer

Excel sometimes auto-formats CSV cells as numbers, dates or scientific notation — long URLs with digit-heavy paths can get truncated to '1.23E+14'. The fix: import via Data → Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV (Power Query path) and explicitly set every column type to Text before loading. The legacy double-click-to-open path doesn't give you that control, so use it only for small or visually inspected files. The other common issue is BOM-less UTF-8 — Excel sometimes reads CSV as Windows-1252, mangling unicode in URLs. xmlsitemapmaker.com writes UTF-8 with quoted fields, but if you see garbled characters, save as UTF-8 with BOM or open the file in Google Sheets instead.

Question 21

How do I open a UTF-8 CSV in Excel without encoding issues?

Accepted Answer

Excel struggles with UTF-8 unless the file declares a BOM (byte-order mark). If your CSV shows garbled characters in non-ASCII URLs (foreign-language paths, accented characters), three fixes. First: import via Data → Get Data → From File → From Text/CSV, and explicitly set File Origin to '65001: Unicode (UTF-8)'. Second: re-save the CSV with UTF-8 BOM — in VS Code, change the encoding picker at the bottom-right to 'UTF-8 with BOM' and save. Third: open in Google Sheets first, which handles UTF-8 cleanly by default, then download as CSV. xmlsitemapmaker.com writes UTF-8 without BOM by default for maximum tool compatibility; the import flow handles the rest.

Question 22

Is XML or CSV better for sitemap data?

Accepted Answer

XML is the canonical format — search engines like Google and Bing only consume sitemaps as XML, following the sitemaps.org protocol. CSV is for downstream analysis: dropping URLs into a spreadsheet, BigQuery table, n8n flow, or content audit. The two formats serve different audiences: XML is for crawlers, CSV is for humans and analytics. Convert XML → CSV when you want to inspect, filter, diff or pipe URLs into another tool. Convert CSV → XML when you're rebuilding a sitemap from a curated URL list (e.g. after pruning redirects or noindex pages) — xmlsitemapmaker.com's 'Clean XML' export does exactly that, emitting a valid urlset from any of our supported inputs.

Question 23

How do I convert a CSV back to an XML sitemap?

Accepted Answer

Convert a CSV back to an XML sitemap by wrapping each URL in … tags inside a root. If your CSV has lastmod, changefreq or priority columns, add them as child tags inside each . Save the file as UTF-8 with .xml extension and place it at the root of your domain. The xmlsitemapmaker.com converter accepts CSV input on the Paste tab — pick 'Clean XML' as the export format and you get a valid sitemap.xml ready to submit to Google Search Console. The opposite direction (CSV → XML) is the common workflow after pruning a sitemap for noindex / redirected / 404 URLs.

Question 24

Why does my sitemap.xml return HTML instead of CSV?

Accepted Answer

If you visit /sitemap.xml and see a webpage instead of XML, your framework or hosting layer is serving the app shell at that path. It's common with single-page React/Vue/Angular apps, Next.js sites missing a sitemap route, or Vercel/Netlify rewrites that catch everything. Result: when you paste that URL into a converter, the converter receives HTML, not XML, and either errors or extracts every internal link from the page (sometimes useful, sometimes not). Two fixes. First: switch the converter to HTML sitemap mode — xmlsitemapmaker.com auto-detects this and falls back to extracting <a href> links. Second: fix the framework so /sitemap.xml returns Content-Type: application/xml with real XML content.

Question 25

Why does my CSV show <urlset> tags instead of URLs?

Accepted Answer

If your CSV contains literal '', '' or '' strings as text, the converter treated your XML as plain text and didn't parse it. Two causes. First: the input was malformed XML — open the source in a browser and check that it starts with

Question 26

How big can a sitemap be before I need to split it?

Accepted Answer

The sitemaps.org protocol caps a single sitemap at 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Hit either ceiling and you need to split content across multiple files and reference them from a sitemap-index. Gzipped sitemaps can be any compressed size, but they still have to decompress to ≤50 MB. For most CMS-generated sitemaps, files land at 1,000–5,000 URLs each (well under the cap) split across a sitemap-index — that's the recommended pattern for fast parsing, easier triage in Search Console, and clean coverage reporting per content type. For converters: xmlsitemapmaker.com bounds remote fetches to 25 MB per file but follows sitemap-index files, so a multi-million-URL site is still one conversion.

Question 27

How do I split a large sitemap?

Accepted Answer

Split a large sitemap by content type, by section, or by URL chunk, then reference all the children from a sitemap-index. By content type is the cleanest: one child sitemap per pages, posts, products, categories, images, videos. By section works for multi-region/multi-language sites: one per locale. By URL chunk is the fallback — chunk URLs into groups of, say, 5,000–10,000 each. Keep each child well under the 50,000-URL and 50 MB per-file ceilings. The sitemap-index lists each child with entries. Submit only the index URL in Google Search Console — Google fetches every child automatically. WordPress (Yoast/Rank Math), Shopify and most major CMSes generate this split automatically when needed.

Question 28

How do I batch convert multiple sitemaps to one CSV?

Accepted Answer

If the sitemaps live behind a single sitemap-index, point the converter at the index — it fans out, fetches every child, dedupes and merges into one CSV automatically. If the sitemaps are unrelated (e.g. a competitor matrix where you want one row per URL across 10 different sites), there's no single-shot way: run one conversion per sitemap, then concatenate the CSVs. On macOS/Linux: head -n 1 first.csv > all.csv && for f in *.csv; do tail -n +2 "$f" >> all.csv; done. In Python: pandas.concat([pd.read_csv(f) for f in files]).drop_duplicates('url'). xmlsitemapmaker.com is single-input by design; bulk-merging across origins is outside its scope.

Question 29

How do I extract just URLs from a sitemap?

Accepted Answer

To extract URLs from a sitemap, read every tag inside the root, dedupe, and output as one URL per line. xmlsitemapmaker.com's TXT export does exactly this — paste the sitemap URL, pick TXT as the format, get back a flat URL list. From the command line: curl https://example.com/sitemap.xml | grep -oP '(?<=)[^<]+'. In Python: xml.etree.ElementTree with the sitemap namespace. For sitemap-index files, fetch and union the contents of every child. Always dedupe — sitemap-index files occasionally repeat URLs across child files, and the same URL can appear in pages, posts and image sitemaps simultaneously on platforms like WordPress.

Question 30

Can I convert a sitemap to CSV from the command line?

Accepted Answer

Yes — use curl to fetch the sitemap, then pipe through xmlstarlet or a one-liner. The shortest version: curl -s https://example.com/sitemap.xml | xmlstarlet sel -t -m '//_:url' -v '_:loc' -o ',' -v '_:lastmod' -n > sitemap.csv. The underscore prefix sidesteps the sitemap namespace. For sitemap-index files, you'd need a wrapper script that follows the children — or use Python's xml.etree which handles namespaces more cleanly. If you don't want a local tool, curl xmlsitemapmaker.com directly: curl -X POST -F 'sitemapUrl=https://example.com/sitemap.xml' -F 'format=csv' https://xmlsitemapmaker.com/sitemap.csv -o sitemap.csv. The endpoint accepts the same form data the web UI sends.

Question 31

How do I convert a sitemap behind a paywall or login?

Accepted Answer

Public converters can only fetch publicly-accessible sitemaps — if /sitemap.xml requires authentication, the converter receives a 401 or 403 and can't proceed. Two fixes. First: download the sitemap manually in your authenticated browser session (just open the URL while logged in, then File → Save As → sitemap.xml), and use the Paste or Upload tab on xmlsitemapmaker.com. Second: if the site is yours, expose the sitemap publicly (sitemaps are meant to be public — Googlebot can't authenticate either). For competitor research, manual browser download is the only ethical path. Never put credentials into a public web tool, and confirm any data you upload doesn't contain sensitive URLs.

Question 32

Is the sitemap converter secure?

Accepted Answer

Yes. xmlsitemapmaker.com runs on Cloudflare Workers for the duration of one request and never stores the sitemap, URLs, file contents or any of the converted output. There's no database, no logs of URL content, and no analytics beyond aggregate page-view counts. The conversion happens server-side because some sitemaps (sitemap-index files, gzipped sitemaps, cross-origin URLs) can't be fetched from the browser due to CORS. For maximum privacy on sensitive URLs, use the Paste or Upload tabs instead of the URL tab — that way the sitemap content never leaves your machine before being sent to us as form data, processed in memory, and discarded.

Question 33

How do I find the sitemap of a website?

Accepted Answer

Check three places in order. First: the conventional location at https://example.com/sitemap.xml works for most sites. Second: open /robots.txt and look for a line that starts with Sitemap: — this is the authoritative reference, and many sites declare multiple sitemaps there. Third: probe common variants — /sitemap_index.xml, /sitemap-index.xml, /wp-sitemap.xml (WordPress), /sitemap1.xml. xmlsitemapmaker.com's sitemap checker tool automates all of this: enter a domain and it parses robots.txt, probes 8 common paths in parallel and content-sniffs each candidate to confirm it really is a sitemap. If none exist, the site genuinely doesn't publish one — use the URL generator to crawl and build a sitemap from the homepage.

Question 34

Is XML a CSV file?

Accepted Answer

No — XML and CSV are different formats with different purposes. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) uses nested tags to represent structured, hierarchical data — like a sitemap's tree. CSV (Comma-Separated Values) is flat tabular data, one row per record, one column per field. Converting between them flattens or unflattens the structure: XML → CSV picks specific fields (loc, lastmod, etc.) and writes them as columns; CSV → XML wraps each row's fields in tags. They're not interchangeable — a sitemap.xml file submitted to Google Search Console as a CSV would fail validation immediately. Convert XML to CSV for analysis, but keep the XML version for actual search-engine submission.

Question 35

How do I filter the sitemap CSV by URL pattern?

Accepted Answer

Filter the CSV in your spreadsheet tool. In Excel/Sheets: select the URL column, Data → Filter, then text-filter on contains '/blog/' or starts-with 'https://example.com/products/'. For larger sets, command-line is faster: grep '/blog/' sitemap.csv writes only matching rows. In Python: df[df['URL'].str.contains('/blog/')]. If you want filtering before conversion (e.g. only blog URLs from a huge sitemap), there's no built-in filter in xmlsitemapmaker.com — convert everything, then filter the CSV. For sitemap-index files where each child is a different content type (which is the common WordPress/Shopify pattern), just point the converter at one child sitemap instead of the index to get pre-filtered output.

Question 36

How do I sort URLs in my sitemap CSV?

Accepted Answer

Open the CSV in Excel or Google Sheets, select the URL column, then Data → Sort A→Z (or Z→A for reverse). For sort by last-modified date, change that column type to TIMESTAMP first or it'll sort lexicographically. From the command line: sort -t ',' -k 1 sitemap.csv writes a sorted version. xmlsitemapmaker.com preserves the original order from the source sitemap by default — sitemaps often imply priority by listing URLs in a specific order (newest first, by depth, by lastmod), so the converter doesn't sort. If you want sorted output specifically, use the JSON export and pipe through jq, or sort the CSV after download.

Question 37

How do I validate a sitemap before converting?

Accepted Answer

Validate a sitemap against the sitemaps.org protocol: well-formed XML, ≤50,000 URLs, ≤50 MB uncompressed, <loc> values that are valid absolute URLs on the declared host, optional lastmod in W3C date format, priority in 0.0–1.0, and changefreq from the allowed set. xmlsitemapmaker.com's validator catches all of these in one pass — paste the URL or content, get back a list of errors and warnings. Common failures: malformed XML (unescaped &, missing closing tag), duplicate URLs, http/https hostname mismatches, invalid lastmod ('5/12/2024' isn't valid — must be 2024-05-12), priority values outside 0.0–1.0, and URLs on a different domain than the sitemap. Fix issues before converting; the converter trusts the input.

Question 38

What is an XML sitemap?

Accepted Answer

An XML sitemap is a structured text file that lists every URL on a website you want search engines to discover. It follows the open Sitemap protocol at sitemaps.org and uses XML tags — , , and — to describe each page. Google, Bing and other crawlers read the file to find URLs faster than they would by following links alone. A single XML sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed; bigger sites use a sitemap-index that references multiple child sitemaps. When you 'convert an XML sitemap to CSV', you're flattening the XML tree into rows so you can analyze, audit or pipe the URLs into other tools.

Question 39

What is a sitemap-index?

Accepted Answer

A sitemap-index is an XML file that references multiple child sitemaps instead of listing URLs directly. It uses the root element and one entry per child sitemap. Sites need one whenever their URL count exceeds the 50,000-per-file protocol limit, or whenever they want to split content for cleaner Search Console reporting (one child per pages, posts, products, etc.). When you convert a sitemap-index to CSV, the converter follows every child and merges all URLs into one flat file — xmlsitemapmaker.com adds a Source Sitemap column so you can trace each URL back to its child sitemap. Search Console only needs the index URL submitted, not each child individually.

Question 40

What's the difference between an XML and HTML sitemap?

Accepted Answer

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file consumed by search-engine crawlers. An HTML sitemap is a human-readable webpage. The XML version uses the sitemaps.org protocol — XML tags, lastmod dates, optional priority — and lives at /sitemap.xml. The HTML version is a normal page (often at /sitemap or /sitemap.html) listing every internal link as anchors, designed for visitors. XML sitemaps are the SEO essential; HTML sitemaps are an accessibility and UX nicety. They don't replace each other. When converting to CSV, the two formats need different parsers — xmlsitemapmaker.com auto-detects which one you've given it, parses XML via the urlset structure or HTML via anchor extraction, and produces the same CSV format either way.

Question 41

What is lastmod in a sitemap?

Accepted Answer

lastmod is an optional XML tag inside each <url> entry that tells crawlers when the page last changed. The value must be in W3C date format — either YYYY-MM-DD or a full ISO 8601 timestamp (2024-05-12T14:30:00Z). When you convert a sitemap to CSV, lastmod becomes a separate column. It's the most useful sitemap field for analytics: sort by lastmod to find stale content, filter for recent changes to plan re-crawls, or compare two snapshots over time to detect publish patterns. Google uses lastmod to prioritize re-crawling, but ignores it entirely if you set it to the current date on every URL — that abuse pattern is detected and the field gets discounted.

Question 42

Should I include changefreq and priority columns?

Accepted Answer

If they're in the source sitemap, yes — they're free metadata to keep. If you're generating a CSV for downstream tools, both are usually safe to drop. Google has publicly confirmed it ignores both and when crawling. Bing reportedly still uses changefreq as a weak signal. For analytics workflows, changefreq is rarely actionable; priority is even less so since most CMS generators set it to 1.0 on everything. Where they help: spotting CMSes that diligently set per-URL values (a sign of a careful SEO setup) and pre-filtering — e.g. 'crawl only URLs with priority ≥ 0.8'. xmlsitemapmaker.com only writes these columns when the source sitemap has them, so empty data doesn't bloat the CSV.

Question 43

How do I create a sitemap in Next.js?

Accepted Answer

Next.js supports XML sitemaps natively via a sitemap.ts file in the app directory (App Router) or a getServerSideProps route in pages/ (Pages Router). Create app/sitemap.ts exporting a default function that returns an array of { url, lastModified, changeFrequency, priority } objects — Next.js serves it at /sitemap.xml with the correct Content-Type. For dynamic routes (blog posts, products, docs), fetch the slug list inside sitemap.ts and emit one entry per item. For sites above 50,000 URLs, generate a sitemap-index plus multiple child sitemaps with the same pattern (Next.js 13.4+ supports splitting). Avoid the legacy approach of writing static files to /public — it goes stale fast and doesn't follow dynamic data.

Question 44

How do I submit a sitemap to Google after converting?

Accepted Answer

If you've converted a CSV back into an XML sitemap (via xmlsitemapmaker.com's Clean XML export, after pruning), submit the XML in Google Search Console. Sign in, select your verified property, open the Sitemaps report from the left-hand menu, paste the sitemap URL and click Submit. Within minutes, Search Console fetches the file and reports either Success or a parse error. You don't need to resubmit on every update — Google re-fetches on its own schedule. You should also declare the sitemap in robots.txt with Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml, which lets Bing, DuckDuckGo and other crawlers discover it. Only submit XML — Google ignores CSV.

How to convert XML sitemap to CSV.

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