A sitemap is instructions to a search engine telling it where to crawl your website. This will ensure that search engines will find all the relevant content of your site an display it in search results. Check out Google’s guide of how Google Search works to learn exactly how crawling works.
If you create a page or piece of content that isn’t linked anywhere, it’s unlikely that a search engine will find it. When you link to a page on another page of your website, search engines can find it.
Sitemap basics
For the central distribution Druapl here of Oregon State University, you can find your sitemap at sitename.oregonstate.edu/sitemap.xml.
This will show every piece of content included in your sitemap.
To configure your sitemap, first log into your website. You need to be an architect to configure it.
Go to Configuration > Search and Metadata > XML Sitemap
Drupal 10 sitemap configuration
For Drupal 10, we have included the default content types (profile, basic page, and story) and groups.
If you create any custom content type, add it to the sitemap when you create it.
If you use taxonomy term pages in your website and want them to show up in search results, you can add them. You can add them under Sitemap Entities. This is also where you can add other entities of your site, as you see fit.
Pages produced by a view
Pages produced by a view are unique and need to be manually added to the sitemap under Custom links in the sitemap configuration.
Submit the sitemap
If you have Google Search Console turned on, you can double check that it’s being submitted to Google via the Sitemaps report. Learn how to manage your sitemaps in Google Search Console.