Getting the Most out of the Sitemap

Search Engine Optimization

Using robots.txt

Add a robots.txt file in the source directory which has a link to the sitemap.xml or sitemapindex.xml file. For example:

User-agent: *

Sitemap: https://my-site.com/docs/sitemap.xml

Then, add robots.txt to html_extra_path in conf.py:

html_extra_path = ['robots.txt']

Submit Sitemap to Search Engines

Submit the sitemap.xml or sitemapindex.xml to the appropriate search engine tools.

Site Search Optimization

Site search crawlers can also take advantage of sitemaps as starting points for crawling.

Examples: