Sitemaps and video: what belongs in one

A sitemap is a list of URLs you would like crawled, with some metadata about each. It does not force anything to be indexed; it tells a crawler where to look and when something last changed.

What should be in it

• Pages you want in search results.
• Pages that return a 200.
• Pages that are canonical — the version you consider authoritative.
• With an accurate last-modified date, which is the field most often filled in badly or not at all.

The contradiction nobody notices

A URL that carries a noindex tag, listed in the sitemap.

You have asked a crawler to come and look at a page and then told it not to use the page. Search Console reports it as an error on every one, and on a store it happens constantly: privacy and terms pages get a noindex, nobody removes them from the sitemap, and the coverage report fills with warnings that obscure the real problems.

Whatever you use to mark a page as noindex should also be what removes it from the sitemap, so the two cannot disagree.

The other things that should not be there

• Paginated archive pages. Page two of a blog index is the same listing with different rows. Let page one be the entry.
• Search results pages. Infinite, low value, and a crawl-budget sink.
• Tag pages with two posts on them. Thin pages competing with the posts they list.
• Author archives on a one-author site. A duplicate of the blog index.

Last modified dates

The single most useful field and the most neglected. It is the hint that tells a crawler a page it already has is worth fetching again.

It has to be honest. A site that reports everything as modified today teaches the crawler that the field is meaningless, and then a genuinely updated page gets no benefit from it. Use the real modification time.

On dedicated video sitemaps

A separate video sitemap, listing video metadata per URL, is an option and it is rarely the highest-value work. If your VideoObject markup is correct and your pages are crawlable, the markup is doing the same job.

It becomes worth it at scale — hundreds of videos across many pages, where you want explicit control over what gets crawled and a clearer report on it.

The one thing to do today

Open your sitemap, pick five URLs at random, and check each one returns a 200 and is not noindexed. That five-minute exercise finds a genuine problem on a surprising share of stores.