Sitemap
In short
A sitemap is a file listing, for search engines, which pages your website has and when each was last changed. It is a hint rather than an instruction: Google still decides for itself what to include. Its value is that new and sparsely linked pages get discovered sooner than they otherwise would.
What it does, and what it does not
It helps with discovery, not with ranking. A page listed in the sitemap is not judged more favourably; it is simply found sooner. On a small, well-linked site the difference is slight. On a large site with deep pages it is not.
The converse also holds: removing a page from the sitemap does not remove it from the index. That takes a different instruction to the crawler — the sitemap is the wrong tool for it.
The fields Google ignores
Two fields in the sitemap standard have no effect: the priority value and the stated change frequency. Google has confirmed repeatedly that it evaluates neither. Maintaining them means maintaining numbers nobody reads.
What does get read is the last-modified date — but only while it is true. A sitemap that stamps today's date on every page at every request destroys exactly that value: a signal that never varies carries no information.
Two languages, one reciprocal reference
A bilingual Swiss site adds a wrinkle: every address should point at its language counterparts, in both directions. Where the reference is missing one way, a search engine is more likely to treat the two pages as separate sites than as versions of the same thing.
For German-speaking Switzerland, the language tag `de-CH` is the more precise signal than a bare `de` — it distinguishes the Swiss version from a German one.
How we handle it
We generate the sitemap from the actual page inventory rather than maintaining it by hand — a list somebody has to keep in step is wrong by the second relaunch. Context: SEO.
The quickest check there is: open your own sitemap. If it lists a page that no longer exists, you know how current it is.
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