Should a Sitemap include the home page?

seo sitemap xml-sitemap homepage

7,263

Yes, but just to add more customization, like how many times does it get changed, and what is the last update time.

7,263

RationalDev likes GoFundMonica

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Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

RationalDev likes GoFundMonica over 1 year

I have seen some sitemaps that include the home page, eg http://example.com and others that do not.

Is including a home page of any use and recommended in any reputable documentation?

Edit: The offical sitemap site http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html shows examples of customization to the homepage, so the real question is if a homepage with default settings is assumed by the search engines and is only required for customization. There are defaults for the optional parameters and some people suggest leaving it to the search engine algorithm if you don't know what you are doing.

This article suggests, "By default, when you submit a sitemap to the search engines your homepage gets a priority level of 1, and all other pages get a priority level of .5", but is the only reference I have found. However, it is ambiguous and does not answer my curiosity.
- Admin almost 9 years
  
  Yes. The home page should exist in your sitemap- every time. What would be the advice not to? It just does not make sense not to include the home page.
- Admin almost 9 years
  
  Some people seem to think it is implied that your home page would be included. I've been looking at different static site generators recently and some of their sitemap generators do not seem to include it by default and I was seeing if there was a reason why. Benefits to include it I can think of are have more control over the priority and update time.
- Admin almost 9 years
  
  I was hoping to keep it simple by not having to modify any code. ;)
- Admin almost 9 years
  
  If it is not included, I would not work hard to include it. I rolled my own sitemap generator and so it was easy. But if it is not so easy, skip it for now. There are more important things to do I am sure! Most of the time the sitemap is not really used anyway. It is only used to ensure that a site can be properly crawled the old fashioned way. If a search engine can crawl your site, then it will prefer that. Where a sitemap becomes important is for extremely large sites and site with pages behind a paywall or login.
RationalDev likes GoFundMonica almost 9 years

Search engines are capable of finding your pages via the links to and within a website. Some people in the past do not use them at all and claim good results, eg: smallbusinesssem.com/…
RationalDev likes GoFundMonica almost 9 years

I will accept this as if you can show the last update time, I think this would always useful and good practice if you are using a sitemap.
jor over 5 years

@RationalDev: the linked article is more than 10 years old.
Stephen Ostermiller about 2 years

Even today search engines engines discover URLs from other sources than sitemaps. Sitemaps can help search engines find all your URLs, but it isn't the only way. In no case do search engines limit their crawling to just what is in your sitemap.
Admin about 2 years

Google Search Console report my homepage as duplicate? This URL is now excluded. The message by Google is saying: "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical".
Admin about 2 years

Duplicate of what? That usually means that Google is indexing a slight variation. Check for http vs https, www vs no-www and slash vs index.html.
Admin about 2 years

Google search console isn't saying from which url this homepage is a duplicate from. Pretty annoying right? It's the first item from the urlset: moneytips.nl/sitemap.xml
Admin about 2 years

Search Console usually will tell you if you use the inspect URL tool.
Admin about 2 years

I think I found the root cause. It was still thinking the homepage was a redirect (503). But that was the past. So I manually request for indexing. Google should now hopefully see the url is no longer redirected.
Admin about 2 years

A 503 is not a redirect. Redirects are all in the 300s. HTTP statuses in the 500s are all errors. Specifically 503 is service temporarily unavailable. It is usually used for maintenance mode for your site.
Admin about 2 years

Oops my bad. I mean to say 302 I think. I manage all my sites with nginx. So you can redirect pages as well
Admin about 2 years

That makes more sense. If you had been using a 302 redirect Google would be very unlikely to index your homepage.