---
updatedAt: 2026-09-28T14:48:49.000Z
agentTools:
  projectIndex: https://developer.searchblox.com/llms.txt
---

# Using Sitemaps

## Using Sitemaps

Sitemaps help search crawlers discover and index all the important pages on your website, especially pages that may not be easily reachable through normal link crawling. By providing a structured list of URLs, sitemaps ensure more complete and accurate indexing of your content in SearchBlox.

> **Note:** Sitemap settings can be configured from the WEB collection settings in the SearchBlox Admin Console.

## Enabling Sitemaps

By default, Follow Sitemaps is disabled in the WEB collection settings. To enable it:

1. Go to the SearchBlox Admin Console
2. Navigate to Collections > WEB Collection > Settings
3. Enable Follow Sitemaps

Once enabled, SearchBlox will index only the sitemap URLs provided, following the rules below.

## How Sitemaps Work in SearchBlox

* SearchBlox supports sitemap.xml listed in robots.txt when Follow Sitemaps is enabled
* If a sitemap.xml file contains links to other sitemaps, SearchBlox will index all the linked sitemaps automatically
* Only standard XML sitemaps are supported — compressed XML files (tar or gzip) are not supported
* When Follow Sitemaps is enabled, only sitemap links such as `https://example.com/sitemap.xml` are indexed
* Allow/Disallow path rules are applied when indexing sitemap URLs

## Adding Multiple Sitemaps

You can index multiple sitemaps by providing multiple sitemap URLs in the root path of the WEB collection settings. Add each sitemap URL on a separate line.

### Example

```text
https://example.com/sitemap.xml
https://example.com/sitemap-blog.xml
https://example.com/sitemap-products.xml
```

## Limitations

> **Important:** The following WEB collection settings do not apply when indexing via sitemaps:

* Spider depth
* Other standard WEB collection crawl settings

Sitemaps are processed independently of the normal crawl behaviour. Only the path Allow/Disallow rules are respected during sitemap indexing.

## Supported Sitemap Format

SearchBlox supports standard XML sitemaps following the Sitemap Protocol. A basic sitemap looks like this:

```xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/page1</loc>
    <lastmod>2024-01-01</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/page2</loc>
    <lastmod>2024-01-02</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>
```

> **Note:** Compressed sitemap files in tar or gzip format are not supported. Ensure your sitemap is a plain XML file before indexing.